Murder Melody

He had darker hair then, and two uncovered eyes instead of one, but he still dressed neatly, and he still smiled wide, with the kind of big grin that lightened up his whole face and made the world feel better. Haze looked different, too - younger, brighter, still dressed in white but more relaxed.

“So,” Baekhyun told him. “The all-great Exalted of Insomnia also has weaknesses, then? I cannot believe.”

“Everyone has them,” Haze replied. “Even when one is the most powerful Blessed person in the whole Prosperan Empire.”

“Right now, were you talking about yourself in a great, you know, display of modesty or were you so kindly mentioning me?”

“What should I call you, then? The most powerful among those who can’t use Soul Magic? The greatest among the not-so-regular, regular folk?” Haze laughed, so good naturally that Chanyeol couldn’t help but to feel surprised. He took a step back, the edges of the white space in his dreams stretching around him. He didn’t really feel like looking, but at the same time he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the pair in front of him and the way their edges seemed to blur with the colorless background, like they were going to be swallowed by mist at any second.

“You should give me credit too, as the person who is shaping Insomnia with you. You are definitely putting in your strength, but what could you do without my creativity, hard work and eternal patience? I am a key figure in the great scheme of things.”

“Of course you are.” Haze softly bumped Baekhyun’s forehead with his thumb in a gesture so familiar that Chanyeol felt his own heart hurt. “You’re my little bit of happiness in all this mess. Being at the top is lonely sometimes.”

“Wow. All that modesty. Humility. My great, lonely lord, devoted to rid the world of its painful burden of… pain.”

“I am serious.” Haze shook his head, mockingly chastising. “You asked about my weakness, and there’s only one when it comes to Soul Magic.”

“Which one? That it makes you deep and broody?”

“Excuse me, but what I am is charming and misunderstood. And, anyway, no. If you think it, it’s a pretty simple weakness: Soul Magic, the strongest part of it, the one that controls human emotion, cannot be used in the very own wizard who casts it, or in others like him. Like me.”

“So what? You can’t affect your own mind? It sounds pretty obvious.” Baekhyun frowned, looking up at him. His face looked so strangely young and beautiful without the eyepatch on - he was every inch the match for someone as unnaturally pretty as young Haze, even when he looked so confused. “Ah. I see. I see what you mean,” he said.

“I told you it was pretty obvious.”

Young Haze’s figure started to fade into the white of that endless, colorless room, and only his present version remained - the one who had been standing next to Chanyeol from the start, with his hair pushed back and the mocking smirk on his lips.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” said Baekhyun, now alone among the swirls of mist, his figure translucent. “I’ll be the one to ease your pain if you’re ever hurt.”

His silhouette froze in the middle of a smile. His Baekhyun, the one who had fallen asleep only meters away from him that night, never smiled like that, not even when he was open and honest and the music in his soul matched the glow in his eyes.

“He looks like a different person,” Chanyeol said.

“He used to be different, then. An ambitious little thing,” Haze shook his hand and the shape disappeared in a puff of smoke. “He betrayed me. And you are still trusting him?”

“I do.”

“You really.” Haze sighed, and Baekhyun’s silhouette materialized from the mist again. He was the same boy, but the cheeky smile was gone from his face and everything that remained was an empty expression, the same lifeless eyes that Chanyeol had seen when Haze had made him dream with him for the first time. “This is what he became. I offered him to you, don’t you remember? And you said no.”

“No offense, Exalted, but I don’t think you’re in the place to offer grown-up adults to me like you were giving me some kind of weird birthday present.”

Baekhyun was staring up at him, his back against Haze’s chest. He didn’t react to his presence, he didn’t try to fight. It was so unnerving to watch that Chanyeol would have punched his reflection in the face.

“You two are quite the pair.”

“What?”

“You are the kind to crave the things you shouldn’t even think of having, considering the situation, but you can’t help it. And Baekhyun… He did everything he could to destroy me and there yet he his, shielding you from harm like you and me like we weren’t two sides of the same coin.”

“You and I are different.”

“Black and white. And even though we still share a power, look the same and have feelings for the same boy.”

Chanyeol stammered. “You’re not right. I don’t—”

“Which one of the three ‘you don’t,’ exactly? You might dislike me, Park Chanyeol, but as long as we are two halves of the same soul, you may be partially immune to my magic, but I’ll still be in your head.” The illusion of Baekhyun faded away, and Haze broke through the smoke to grab him, one hand heavy on his shoulder and the other under his chin, forcing him to stay still and to look at him in the eye. “You should consider letting me in, you know? Because the weaker you force my body to be, the stronger I’ll become inside of you. I’ll be your own parasite and I’ll thrive while you wither. I’ll dig deep into you, and I’ll enjoy every second. So don’t fight it, boy. Give in.”

Haze’s breath was fanning in his face. Chanyeol’s hand closed around his wrist. “No.”

“Oh, really?” Haze whispered, drawing him close. “But how long will you be able to resist? You shouldn’t forget that, as hard as you struggle, you are still weaker than I am.”

Chanyeol woke up with a low, scared gasp and Baekhyun practically all over him.

“Hey, you okay?” the other boy was saying, and he sounded concerned. “Are you awake now or do I need to slap you?”

It was the Baekhyun he remembered, not the happy boy who had joked with Haze, nor the lifeless thing that had stared at him with empty eyes. That one was the Baekhyun with the eyepatch on his face and blades hidden under his clothes. And he was, coincidentally, on top of him.

“What are you—?”

“You were tossing around, and you screamed. You were calling out.”

“For who?”

Baekhyun hesitated for a second, and Chanyeol felt himself blushing. “Whatever I said, I didn’t mean—”

“A couple of days ago, you told me that Haze appeared in your nightmares, so I thought you would like me to wake you up if you looked distressed,” Baekhyun rushed to add at the same time. “I was not sure if it was him, of course, but you were mumbling so here we are.”

Above his head there were only Baekhyun and the metal ceiling of Jongdae’s metro car store. They had been allowed to stay there until the situation settled down and bit and the marshall stopped sending patrols looking for them all around town. Sehun had gone to their old apartment to get clean clothes and supplies, but had finally stayed out and away of Baekhyun’s home - he had been lucky enough to see the police officers before he went in, he said.

They were safe, and they would remain that way for the moment, but having to stay in the tunnels meant the only place they could sleep were the seats of Jongdae’s old train, and that meant that they had to share the little space they had - and that they were alone.

Which was great because he felt comfortable with him. Bad, because he could almost hear Haze snorting somewhere deep inside his head.

And even worse because Baekhyun was making a conscious effort not to touch him - because he couldn’t touch him - and Chanyeol was painfully and acutely aware of the main reason why he would not.

If you could hurt Haze by hurting me, then, would you?

“Well, I’m glad you woke me up, because it was that guy messing with my head,” he said with a sigh, sitting up so Baekhyun would need to move away. He already looked so awake, so well dressed, as well prepared as if he lived in a mansion in West District instead of inside a train. “I don’t know what in the world he wants. He talks about domination and control sometimes and then he’s going on and on about me submitting to him and letting him in.”

“Which one was it this time?”

“I’m not sure. For a moment, he looked like he was about to kiss me.”

He thought that Baekhyun would look at least politely taken aback, but he actually smirked. “Talk about a blatant display of narcissism,” he commented. “Hah. I would tell you the mental image, aesthetically speaking, sounds a bit hot, if it wasn’t because Haze is Haze and that makes it a little disgusting.”

Chanyeol stared at him, speechless. “For god’s sake, what kind of stuff are you into?”

“Don’t let him corrupt your innocence, will you?”

Chanyeol deadpanned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Baekhyun covered his lips with his fingers. “Am I?”

“You are kidding me,” Chanyeol accused. “And, for the sake of information, I’m not innocent enough to be corrupted. Whatever in the world it was that you were implying with that.”

“That’s nice to know,” said Baekhyun, letting out a loud guffaw. “But hey, are you in a better mood now? You look less pale, at least.”

“I’m… okay.” Chanyeol had forgotten for a while what the conversation had originally been about, and he shivered as the unpleasant memory made its way back into his mind. Baekhyun was observing him, expression unconventionally resolute.

“Being serious now, Chanyeol: whatever he’s telling you, don’t ever fall for it. He’s strong, and he might have a way into your dreams or into your head, but if he’s attacking you that is because he knows you have the power to resist him. He wouldn’t make such an effort to destroy something that doesn’t threaten him.”

You know him that well, huh? “Is that why he always tries so hard to hurt you?”

“Light is not a common Blessing to have, and it’s especially effective against miasma, so there you have it. He did a lot of damage but he couldn’t bring me down. And you won’t fall either, okay? Trust me, I know.”

It was easy to believe Baekhyun when he spoke - he had a way with words and with how he said them, like one of those TV stars that sold things that no one needed and made them a global success. He always sounded so sincere, and that was the scariest when the music Chanyeol heard in him matched that honesty. Everything in Baekhyun right then was fire and fear.

“I’ll try my best, I can promise that.”

“Eh, come on, why so gloomy? Being underground for days is already affecting you this much? You need to, let me see, get distracted.” Baekhyun looked around. “Ah, there it is, I have just what you need!”

Chanyeol started to reject the gesture as soon as he saw what the other boy was looking for, but he couldn’t prevent Baekhyun from taking his guitar out of his case and bringing it to him. He had turned it on, and the red lights danced on his skin as he sat beside him. “Only the special kids have their own, unique, designer-worthy weapon. So here, practice for a while so you can get the bad guy begging on his knees.”

“I don’t know if I feel like practicing.”

“Then play a song for me?”

“I— What?”

Baekhyun gave him a tiny, slightly shaky smile. “Well, I thought it would be nice to get you going if you just didn’t feel compelled to play for the sake of playing? And since you said once that you had never done a song for someone else before, I had the idea of—”

“Of wanting to be the first?” He was offering his own guitar to him, and Chanyeol took it, eyes on Baekhyun’s.

“I guess?”

“Why now?”

“I suppose that because I… Maybe it’s selfish on my side, but you offered once and since then I have wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

“How a person like you would see me.”

And how is a person like me? There was quiet tension under Baekhyun’s perfect posture and dark, leveled gaze - a struggle, a challenge. That boy’s soul was like a cyclone trapped in a crystal ball and the only difference between Chanyeol and the rest of the world was that he had glimpsed and he knew and he wanted the glass to break.

“Song or not, that’s a difficult thing to ask,” he said. “Especially because, for someone so bright, you’ve always appeared to me as the kind of person who doesn’t really want to be seen.”

“And you don’t mind? About that?”

“You have your own war going on. As do I. So it’s infuriating sometimes, but I can’t really say I don’t relate.”

In true honesty, it was way more than infuriating. He could see cracks in the glass in moments like those, and he wanted to break and to smash, to ruin it all so Baekhyun would stop looking so proper and perfect. He was a kid with a hammer, and he hadn’t ever craved anything so bad as he yearned to leave an everlasting mark in the only thing he wasn’t allowed to touch.

And touch he wanted. He wanted to set ablaze but not to burn.

“You want to know a secret?” Baekhyun said, wetting his lips. “Sometimes I think both you and I have a crave for destruction.”

The blood in Chanyeol’s veins was radioactive. There were sparks below his skin, a rhythm in his pulse, in the creak of the seat under him as he moved and in Baekhyun’s shallow intakes of breath.

“It may be,” he whispered. “But I’ve decided that I prefer to die in the crash if I have to instead of allowing my monsters to eat me from the inside out.”

It was all in tune. The pull. The good, and the bad - the possibilities.

And then, it was not.

“Hey, you two,” a voice said. “Not in my train.”

Chanyeol’s powers reacted to the intrusion way before his conscious mind did, resounding to the presence of the two newcomers and reaching out to them, connecting his melody to theirs with invisible tendrils of sound. It had been like that since his powers had settled: he still heard the song of every living human that came close enough but now his mind automatically tries to synchronize to anyone vulnerable to Soul Magic.

That seemed to include everyone he knew with the single exception of Byun Baekhyun - and most probably Haze. Chanyeol was starting to dread the moment he would need to come out to the surface again. If he hadn’t learned to control that thing by then… Well, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he would be screwed.

“Ah, Jongdae!” Baekhyun exclaimed, getting up, and only then Chanyeol remembered that they had been alone and so, so close just before he and his angry fanfare entered the train car. “And Sehun too! How are you doing.”

“Oh, I would have been wonderfully if I hadn’t been stopped in a road control. By the marshall’s army. While they apparently looked for you two.”

“Ah, stars. They should learn to give up, hah?” protested Baekhyun. “How many days has it been? I can’t go up, I can’t exactly go to the Blessed Order without someone to take me there… How am I supposed to do something productive with my life like this?”

“You should consider not turning half of the marshall’s house into a mess,” Sehun mentioned, shrugging.

“I did not! We did not. In the first place, nothing would have happened if Colonel Suho hadn’t decided to return my favor by ratting Chanyeol out to the alternative version of his mother. Secondly, it was a mess, but it affected the people in the room, not the whole house. And third, I had nothing to do with it - it all was Haze’s fault.”

“It’s always Haze’s fault.”

“Because I thought we all agreed that he is in fact very evil?”

“If I were the marshall, I would still want to put you in a cell,” Jongdae stated. “And especially Haze’s reflection. His presence has proven to be dangerous: there’s a wing in the hospital full of the guards in the marshall’s house, all of them infected.”

“But Chanyeol didn’t do that.”

“That’s not as relevant as it seems: he was there, he was following your plan, and thanks to that innocent men and women are sick.”

“Wow, Jongdae, thank you for enlightening me with your wisdom. I don’t know what I would do without it.”

Jongdae’s fanfare was too loud in the narrow metro car, and Chanyeol groaned internally, wishing the volume would go down. And of course, his power reacted and the music went down, suddenly much calmer.

“Sorry Baekhyun, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said, “but the town is on edge and road controls make me feel uncomfortable.”

Baekhyun raised his eyebrows at Chanyeol. “Control that, young man. He doesn’t seem like himself if he’s not generally passive-aggressive towards me. He even looks apologetic.”

“I’m sorry?” Chanyeol replied from his seat. “I still don’t know how to turn it off. I suppose it’ll fade off eventually.”

“How long is eventually? I’m serious about this: I don’t want him smiling at me next.”

Sehun deadpanned at them. “You’re both awful.”

“What did I even do?” Chanyeol protested.

“Enchanting a guy? Turning into Baekhyun’s new partner in crime? Making him approve of Soul Magic? Or of you, at least. You look like very good friends.”

That guy had said that all smirking, like he was proving a point now that Jongdae wasn’t exactly himself, and Chanyeol didn’t know what he was supposed to reply. “We used to be tense with each other before, but not anymore. Or at least there’s no tension of the usual kind, I—”

“Near-death experiences unite people, Sehunnie,” Baekhyun interrupted his rambling, smiling in his general direction. “You should try it sometime. It’s cathartic.”

The other boy huffed. “Whatever you say I don’t exactly need life advice from you. We only came in this early because we wanted to tell you that we arranged your meeting.”

“Wait, what? You really did? With a member of the Blessed Order like I told you?”

“Well yeah, I mentioned you would be interested in selling books on the topic you told me and he said he had material to offer.”

“Books? What are you talking about? What topic?” Chanyeol asked.

“The bond between worlds, and between reflections,” replied Sehun. “Baekhyun’s idea.”

“Reflections?” repeated Chanyeol, turning towards Baekhyun, confused. “What are you trying to do?”

“It’s an excuse,” the other boy replied. “Or at least kind of an excuse. Remember the remaining mirror we need to destroy? The members of the Blessed Order keep it in their library, but of course they won’t be nice and let us do our job. They won’t even let me close to their headquarters, so I needed to give at least one of them a reason to come out and meet me. There was a high chance they sent someone if they didn’t know it was me calling them and if we offered good money - they love to act all high and mighty but they have been broke since Haze took over.”

“So then the topic of the book you mentioned…”

“It was a way for them to meet us but I’m also interested about it. So it’s an excuse but not exactly a lie, if you get what I mean?”

“Baekhyun is always too interested about things,” intervened Jongdae, still sounding pretty groggy. “That’s so remarkable about him.”

Baekhyun sank a hand in his own hair, curling his fingers in the brown strands at the side his head. “Thanks for the insight,” he muttered, turning then to Chanyeol and Sehun with a frown. “We should really let him rest until he is back to his usual self. Having him saying positive stuff about me without being obviously sarcastic is making me feel weird. We should concentrate on the Blessed Order man instead. When are we meeting him?”

Sehun shrugged. “This afternoon?”

Chanyeol blinked. “What?”

“Oh, so soon. That’s nice, I was tired of waiting. Do you need to be there when we meet the guy? Are you coming with us?”

Baekhyun and Sehun started to talk weapons and clothes, books and food and lamp. They would be gone for two or three days, they said, until they could reach the wizards and their order if things went well, and Chanyeol realized he hadn’t asked, not exactly. He had always taken for granted that the Blessed Order would have its headquarters somewhere in town, like the Magitec Research Center, or the Euphoria Hospital, or the marshall’s house had all been, but then the marshall had forbidden wizardry and he hadn’t seen any other wizard except for her, and Baekhyun, and himself - and of course Haze.

“Wait a second, with things as they are it’s not like we can go walking around town in broad daylight,” he said. “But we aren’t going to go up there, right?” Sehun looked at him like Chanyeol was a small kid and he was the all-knowing adult but Baekhyun just grinned. And that was certainly worse, because he recognized that smile. “Where are we meeting that guy and why do I feel like I am not going to like whatever you tell me?”

“Oh, because last time I checked, you didn’t seem to like the abandoned Insomnia Metro tunnels much. And guess where the Blessed Order hides?”

Chanyeol covered his mouth with his hand. “Oh, no,” he muttered.

“Oh yes. Surprise!”

—

Chanyeol should have known that, sooner on later, he would have needed to face the deeper side of those tunnels. It was like an unwritten rule in his life: if he wanted to buy something, it would sell out; if he didn’t join a lottery, his friends would win; if he liked someone, that person would already be dating (or, as an alternate option, he would be the ex of his evil twin); and if he thought there was a part of this city he didn’t want to visit at all he would find himself traveling there in no time, lamp in hand and shadows at his back.

He had never liked the darkness, because the only things it had given him were monsters and bad dreams. Haze’s nightmares turned his whole world into white noise, but there was a moment of total blackness before, and he dreaded that as much, because he could move and could hear but he didn’t see.

Those tunnels were almost the same thing, with the only difference that he couldn’t wake up.

Sehun was leading the way, holding his own lamp up high, like that could do something to bring light to the pitch-black atmosphere and Baekhyun followed, his step steady but his hands not glowing for once. Chanyeol could almost feel the boy’s impulse to turn his own power on, the ring of magic and sound in his veins and the twitch in his fingers, but Sehun had asked him not to and Baekhyun had scoffed and rejected a lamp, but listened anyway.

Baekhyun’s light worked best against miasma and there was no trace of it down there, so Chanyeol objectively agreed that he shouldn’t be wasting strength, much less when his power seemed anything but endless, but he had grown used to the glow and the warmth and he missed them - especially because he knew they were not alone.

They had never been, not since they had left the safety of the train platform and the upper tunnels.

Chanyeol could hear their songs as his mind reached out to theirs and tried to ignore the curiosity, the distrust and the dark chords of violence. They were moving across someone else’s ground, a city under a city, and it wasn’t welcoming.

“How much further?” he asked, but Sehun hushed at him. Perhaps he could feel it too, in a different way than he did. For starters, Baekhyun seemed as tense as Chanyeol was, his whole posture adopting the whole air of fluid grace that he used as a shield every time he thought he was going to be in for a fight.

They had been going down for almost thirty minutes, and he was sure that the good folks of Insomnia had probably abandoned that project when their subway was about to be opened, because everything there looked unused and dusty but completely finished, from the black concrete vaults overhead to the set of rails under their feet. That was the way he would have imagined the metro tunnels back at home to be - if it wasn’t for the presence and the silence, the suffocating mass of quiet all around them. Chanyeol was used to hearing his own music, as well as other people’s songs, but right then, beyond his melody there was nothing. The stations back at home were full of voices, laughter, the muffled sound of trains stopping, doors opening and a thousand of steps on the floor. But there, Chanyeol had his music and only, like he was hearing the sound through earphones and everything else was blocked out.

He was the first among them to notice the presence at the end of the tunnel - he couldn’t see the person, of course, but his mind wrapped around a soft song, testing the waters. His step faltered for a moment and soon Baekhyun was with him, frown cast between light and shadows. “You okay?” he mouthed. Chanyeol pointed forward.

First, there was the yellow, flickering light of another lamp, and then they saw the man as they neared the source of the glow. He was sitting with his back on the black wall of the tunnel and his arms around his knees and looked small and lithe, like a teenager. Chanyeol stole a glance at Baekhyun and saw his mouth twitch before his features stilled in his usual, practiced smile.

“Ah,” he said, when the stranger looked up at the sound of his steps and frowned. His voice boomed across the tunnel, making the shadows that had been following them retreat. “If it isn’t Lu! Long time no see.”

There was confusion in the boy’s face until both his expression and his melody switched to discomfort mode. Here we go again, Chanyeol thought, fighting the urge of his own mind to modify, soften, blur the edges until there was no fight left in him. He felt both powerful and nauseous when he considered, and forced his brain to focus precisely on the bad side of things, concentrating on breathing in and out and following the stranger’s words when he spoke.

“Why is— You didn’t tell me Byun Baekhyun would be coming!” he was exclaiming, eyes on Sehun like he had committed some terrible sin. “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I had known!”

“You didn’t ask,” replied Sehun with a shrug. “I told you someone was interested, you were the one reckless enough to not ask who the person was.”

“But I thought… How was I supposed to know that you would bring the Exalted’s lover of all people?”

“Ex-lover,” Baekhyun corrected, smile bright as fresh blood.

Once he was able to stare at him up close, Chanyeol realized that the stranger wasn’t so young. He was thin, and blond, and good-looking, but he had little creases at the corner of his eyes and his lips, and they seemed to sink into his skin when he pressed his mouth into a thin line. Chanyeol had thought that perhaps regular wizards would look different than regular people, the same way Baekhyun shone brighter than anyone else. Haze looked inhuman, special in his own frightening style, and the marshall had been authoritative despite being sick and broken, and all of them were ostracized wizards, separated from the rest for their own different reasons. Baekhyun had said the members of the Blessed Order were grumpy and hard to deal with, and that had conjured quite the special image of them on his mind, but the young man in front of them wasn’t wearing a black tunic or a pointy hat, just brown laborer trousers, a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and suspenders. The disdain in his voice was a hundred percent angry wizard, however.

“You’re not welcome here. You know the rules.”

Baekhyun let out a very dramatic sigh. “Even if I got cash for you? The last thing I knew from you was that you were selling the books of your oh-so-portentous library to spoiled little nobles in exchange for the money to maintain it. You know Luhan, I am a businessman, I thought we could have a deal.”

The man scoffed. “We know how you get your money.”

“Throwing parties? Or you mean smuggling stuff? Magical objects, like those things you keep deep-down in the tunnels. You could share the marshall’s point of view and go on and on about how magic and alcohol and fun after midnight help the miasma to spread, but that would make you all a bit hypocritical, don’t you think?” He dug into his pocket and took a roll of dark grey bills, offering them to Luhan with a smirk. “Don’t turn off deals that are convenient for you. I brought you the savings of my life, you know?”

He looked like one of those young, rich heirs in TV dramas, and Chanyeol found himself clenching his fists at the dissonance between his pose and his melody, but Luhan couldn’t hear, and most possibly didn’t care, so everything he did was to shake his hand in a very angry, sudden gesture.

The money Baekhyun had been holding flew out of his hand and up into the air, the notes separating and surrounding them like tiny, angry birds in full sync. They circled them in a quick paper dance, leaving a very still and a still smirking Baekhyun in the middle. “What a wonderful display of power,” the latter commented. “Now could you get me my money back? As far as I know, we still haven’t made a deal.”

The flying bills froze mid-air, and then fell to the ground like ashes. “The Blessed Order does not wish to make a deal with you.”

“And so they choose to literally throw my money to the floor of an old tunnel? No wonder you are a specie at the verge of extinction, Luhan. It’s pretty clear that you don’t have what it takes when it comes to basic survival.”

“Oh, excuse me, your Exalted Majesty. Because, according to you, our current situation is our fault and what you and Lord Park Chanyeol did has nothing to do with it!”

“Hey! You shouldn’t say those things,” Chanyeol protested, considering that he should at least intervene when his name was mentioned. Luhan turned towards him for the first time, scowling, but he froze in his spot, lips comically parted, once he had a good look at his face.

“You’re—” he started, turning towards Baekhyun accusingly. “You brought him here! Are you crazy?”

“Not Haze,” said Chanyeol. “I’m his reflection, actually, from the other side of the mirror. And he didn’t bring me here; I came by myself, and because I wanted to.”

“You look so much like him,” blurted Luhan.

“That’s the point about reflections. If you knew Haze well enough, you would be aware that I’m not him. His usual modus operandi consists in filling every little space with miasma and mind-controlling people into submission. And I’m not doing that, am I?” Even though I could. I could soften the melody, turn it off, make you surrender. He wasn’t Haze but he could almost see him, standing at his side and whispering those wretched words into his ear.

Baekhyun tapped the floor with his foot in a quick, rhythmical pattern. It was the only part of his body that wasn’t completely still. “Take the money. It will help you, and I’m only requesting a little help in return. I’m on a mission here, and I’m trying to do something that will serve you all, much more than it’ll serve myself, so listen for once in your life.”

“And what it is you want? Those books Sehun asked us for?”

“More or less. I want access to the library, and I want to talk to the librarian.”

Luhan’s expression hardened. “That’s something I won’t allow.”

“Ask the librarian first. I’ll wait.”

“No.”

“I am also one of the Blessed of Insomnia. It’s my right to demand entrance. So I request it,” said Baekhyun, loud and clear. “I’ll beg for it if you want me to.”

Luhan observed him for a long, silent moment, and Chanyeol had never wanted to punch a man as hard as he wanted to hit that guy in the nose. “Byun Baekhyun,” the wizard finally replied, every word slow and soft, like poisoned honey on his lips. “No one can request to exercise his rights as a member of the Blessed Order after being cast out from it. You’re not one of us; you should take your money and go.”

“As expected from you,” Baekhyun whispered, letting out a soft, humorless laugh. He remained still at the center of a circle of grey, gaze fixed somewhere in front of him and hands in his pockets. Chanyeol thought that he would fight back - he always did, someone had to.

“Baekhyun,” Sehun said softly, “perhaps we should go back. Find another way, okay?”

There wasn’t any other way, Chanyeol knew that.

“Wait,” he called to a retreating Luhan. He didn’t want to talk to that guy. He didn’t want to be taken to his stupid library. He didn’t like to beg. His own powers were ready and would have taken hold of the man so fast. He wasn’t the best at controlling them, but he could have made the man concede to what Baekhyun wanted, kiss the ground at his feet and lead them further down the tunnels. He only needed to modify the melody and he should. That bastard deserved it. “If Baekhyun is not allowed to exercise those rights as a member of the Blessed Order, then I do.”

Luhan turned around, eyes wide open. “What are you saying?”

Baekhyun had finally moved, to turn towards him, and Chanyeol could see that he was smiling. That spurred him on. Do whatever the hell Baekhyun would have done, if he were you. “I am a Soul Mage. I am Blessed. And I haven’t been cast out, now have I? Maybe Haze has been, but not me. So what if I am the one who wants access to your library. Wouldn’t you grant it to me?”

“You are the reflection of—”

“The reflection of a man who I want to destroy. Maybe it’s just me, but you wizards don’t look especially well-off, so maybe you shouldn’t be rejecting help when it comes.”

Luhan’s power flickered, on and off, and the fallen bills trembled on the floor. “The Blessed Order does not recognize traitors,” he protested.

“Which is great, since I’m not one.”

“You’re a telepath, Luhan, why don’t you ask your precious librarian? That’s exactly why he always sends you as a messenger, right? And as terrible as he is, at least he’s more reasonable than you,” added Baekhyun. He was his usual self again, slightly mocking smile on his lips. It was when Chanyeol saw that gesture than he realized that they had, for the moment, won. He had helped Baekhyun to win. “Come on, talk to him. I’m waiting.”

There was a moment of silence as Luhan begrudgingly closed his eyes. Then, a huff and a groan. Chanyeol tried to remain as impassive and serious as any commanding wizard, but he couldn’t cast away the smile on his face.

“I have talked to the librarian,” Luhan pompously announced after a small pause. “And he, in his grace, has granted you access. He wishes to speak with Byun Baekhyun too, so he may accompany you at least until the entrance.”

It was something, at least, and Chanyeol would take it. They could deal with that librarian later. Even though, before that… “I have one more request. Could you please give me Baekhyun’s money back? You were the one to throw it down, and considering that’s the payment I, too, have to offer… You know, I don’t think it’s very polite of you to expect me to kneel on the dirty floor to get it back when you could do me the favor with your power. Do you get what it mean?”

Everything had sounded much more cooler and hero-like in his mind, but that would have to do, and it actually did. And the best part was that he heard Baekhyun laugh once the bills flew from the floor back into his hand.

And that, well, that was certainly great.

—

“You’re not mad, right?” Chanyeol asked in a soft whisper.

They had been traveling down and down across the tunnels, for so long that Chanyeol had lost the sense of time. Back when they were searching for Luhan, he had already thought that it was a shame that all that metro system had gone to waste considering how vast it was, but only then he realized how much of an understatement had the word huge been.

The upper tunnels looked finished, like an invisible train was going to hum over the rails at any second, but the more they descended, the most traces of ruin and abandon they found. Remains of building tools could still be seen, magitec items that had probably been forbidden after The Purge, buried to deep underground even for the smugglers who would have sold them and abandoned next to unfinished vaults and piles of materials, like the workers could return at any second. At one point, the black concrete on the walls gave way to dark, shiny stone and the ground under their feet turned rocky and humid and irregular.

The air was heavy and hot, an invisible but real reminder of the weight of the city above their heads, and even though Chanyeol had been wanting to speak for long, he had been ridiculously afraid of being the one to break the silence. And yet, that silence felt like a deadweight on his feet, and he needed to keep moving forward so he spoke, waiting until Sehun and Luhan had distanced enough from them to not hear.

The question seemed obvious enough to him, and he knew Baekhyun was aware of what he wanted it to mean, but still he made the effort to look politely confused.

“Mad about what?” he asked. He didn’t look angry, not even under his usual mask, but he could have been. Chanyeol would have. Maybe.

“For butting in your conversation with Luhan? You know, saying I was a member of the Blessed Order after he started saying you had been cast out. He was treating you bad, and it was your battle to fight, and still I went and told him he should let me in.”

“You got us inside, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun replied after a second. “I cleared our way to the first and the second mirrors we needed. It was about time that you did something by yourself. You’re like a little bird, leaving your momma’s nest for the first time and I am so glad you’ve learned to fly so well.”

“That’s not what I meant. He was being an asshole to you.”

“And?”

“I don’t know? But if I think about it, I—”

“What? Do you think he wounded my pride and that I should have been the one to man up and defend it? That you were stealing the spotlight from me?”

“You’re better at words that I am.”

“Possibly true: you rant a lot, Park. And yet, I might be a pro at talking people into doing what I want, but sometimes that is not enough. I would know. Think about persuasion like you would about picking a lock: sometimes you will get away with skill, but some doors won’t open unless you own a very specific key. Your presence was that key here, and we needed to move on. My personal battles are irrelevant here in the end, as it is my pride.”

“But you are proud. Prouder than me.”

Baekhyun observed him as they walked, his expression open in slight surprise. “It might be so,” he admitted, lips curving upwards, “but what is pride without honor? Pride is only for the men who can afford it.”

“And why can’t you? Haze?”

“It gets on the way of my duty. If I have to beg, then I’ll beg. There’s no more to it.”

Baekhyun, the man with a purpose, Haze’s voice said, low in Chanyeol’s ear. If he stopped to think and feel, Chanyeol could almost envision him, walking at his side in the shadows, always there and always watching. It was unnerving, like a tingling under his skin that he couldn’t shake off. He wasn’t like that when he stood at my side, you see. He would have done anything for approval; between controlling and being controlled it was obvious what he chose when he was with me.

And why the fuck is this other me so disgusting? Chanyeol snapped, shutting the voice down.

He could understand Baekhyun, in a way. He had always chased his own sound, the music within him, but it was starting to ring so loud - chords, melodies and voices in this scary, deafening melody - that he could just listen and modify, edit the threads of sound while he prayed for the symphony of the world to stop. Baekhyun had asked that morning for Chanyeol to make him a song, to close his eyes and hear Chanyeol’s thoughts of him. And the thing was that Chanyeol had always made music - he had listened and modified and turned the world’s melody into his own - but now everything around him was so loud that he couldn’t concentrate hard enough to create something new anymore. He craved for a second of silence, but that was something he couldn’t afford.

Instead, he was walking towards the depths of Insomnia to turn the volume up.

Sometimes I think both you and I crave for destruction, Baekhyun had said, and Chanyeol knew enough to consider he was totally and absolutely right.

And yet, as he stole a glance at Baekhyun walking beside him, he still hoped he could help the boy behind the mask to stay afloat.

“How many secrets are you not telling me?” he asked, as the tunnel took another turn. He could barely see Luhan now, and Sehun’s silhouette was on the way to disappearing after him. He didn’t intend to rush, or to pressure, just to know.

“Bad ones? Only two.”

“So that means there’s good ones as well?”

“Not so bad ones, I guess?” Baekhyun replied, smiling at him, all warm.

Back after they had started working together for real, Chanyeol had decided to be honest because he had believed someone had to take the first step and start trusting the others, but there was a thing he hadn’t known then, and that now ringed through his veins like a swansong. Not all secrets had to do with mutual trust - the ones buried the deepest were all about how much you trusted yourself.

“Not so bad ones, huh? That’s a plus.” I hope you can let go of your burden soon.

—

When they finally arrived at their destination, Chanyeol was seriously starting to believe that his feet would fall off.

He didn’t know how deep they were, or what part of Insomnia was above them - or even if there was a city over their heads, because they could have walked out of the Insomnia perimeter or be under the Veil river for all he knew - but, honestly speaking, he couldn’t care less. The Blessed Order had hidden from both Haze and the marshall after The Purge, and they had done a hell of a great job.

No one in their right mind would lose hours of precious time on searching the tunnels to find those people. And even if they did, Chanyeol doubted they would be able to find them without getting lost forever.

Luhan had quietly guided them down and down, across abandoned metro tunnels and old mining sites after that, leading a descent into the heart of the black mountain under Insomnia. It had been the first time since he had come across the mirror that Chanyeol had felt genuinely cold, a kind of humid, penetrating chill that sank right into his bones, taking hold and freezing his fingers and limbs, and his feet inside his shoes. It was the cold of the mist, Baekhyun had explained, by the time Chanyeol saw the first traces of curls of whitish smoke oozing from the walls: as one of the jewels of the Prosperan Empire, Insomnia had been built over a source of magical power, a symbol of fortune and strength - the Black City that never sleeps.

The Black City that never wakes up, Haze’s scornful voice had added in the crevices of his mind before Chanyeol used all of his willpower to shut it off.

The entrance to the library of the Blessed Order was at the middle of an old stone tunnel. The first thing that Chanyeol noticed were the massive metal doors blocking the way, a thick wall of grey over black, polished, shiny and strangely unadorned - no flowers, no vines, no trace of the intricate designs that the people up above seemed to love. They looked so heavy that the boy had no idea how in the world could a human being open that, but they just parted for them when they arrived, soundlessly and slowly. Chanyeol took a moment to process that it had actually been Luhan who had done it, with nothing more than a small gesture and no visible strain on his body.

At the other side of the gates, the tunnel had been turned into a room, illuminated by the usual warm, yellowish light of the Insomnia-typical electricity. It looked strangely warm and strangely empty, but mismatched carpets on the floor, tapestries on the black stone walls and a magic, blue fire in a big chimney on one side, but no people there to enjoy it all besides a tiny, dark-haired man sitting behind a desk.

Unlike Luhan, he wore something dark and baggy that suspiciously looked like some kind of robe, and that would have been funny enough to laugh out loud or at least make some sort of snarky comment… if it wasn’t because Chanyeol recognized the guy as soon as he saw him. He would have, anywhere, and pretty much despite himself.

“Kyungsoo?” he asked, breathlessly. He knew enough by then to be aware that the man before him wasn’t the person he knew, but the Insomnia version looked so much like his friend that he felt torn between laughter and pain. Sehun’s Insomnia reflection had tiny but noticeable differences, the hair being the most notorious, but that Kyungsoo had the same black hair as the one he knew - perhaps a little longer, but that was all. His friend would have never worn a tunic so ridiculous, but he was the type, indeed, to dress in black from head to toe, or to frown at him like he was stupid - as that guy was pretty much doing right then and there.

“Am I mistaken if I assume that this… inconvenience is Byun’s doing?” he asked. As everyone else, he had a song that surrounded him as he spoke, and it had the solemn and slow chords of a funeral march. Chanyeol would have laughed in relief, because it was so like him to own the kind of melody that one only would play when a close relative had died, but he didn’t believe Kyungsoo would appreciate that.

“You know me too well,” Baekhyun commented with a sigh. “There were things that needed to be done, so I did them.”

“The Exalted’s reflection needed to be brought to Insomnia.”

“Yes.”

“And I take that all of that chaos in the surface has been caused by your… activities with him.”

“More or less.”

“Give me one single reason for not throwing you away at the marshall’s feet, Byun.”

“I am charming?” Baekhyun said, shrugging. “That, and I came with Chanyeol. And with all the savings of my meaningless, sad life to donate them for your cause. You should at least listen.”

“There are some things money won’t get you,” Kyungsoo interrupted him, absolutely poker faced. “Staring with my interest.”

“Wow,” Chanyeol commented out loud. “You know that you are exactly like the version of yourself in my world, only more savage?”

That seemed enough to capture Kyungsoo’s interest. “Do you know my reflection?” he asked, giving him a glare so grim that Chanyeol gulped.

“Um, yeah. You— He’s a friend of Sehun’s and me in my side of the mirror. Our best friend. Of sorts. We’re an inseparable trio.”

Sehun sighed in something akin to annoyance, but Kyungsoo didn’t even show a reaction to the information. “Sehun, myself and His Exalted Majesty also used to be friends when we were young children, but that charade ended when we discovered that he had plans to toy with the minds of all the inhabitants of the city we lived in. We severed our bonds, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Baekhyun muttered under his breath.

Chanyeol wished he still had the capacity to be witty, or ironic, or even sarcastic, but he had been rendered speechless.

“These worlds have more in common than what you think they do,” commented Kyungsoo, before rising up from behind his desk and walking towards Baekhyun with his sempiternal frown still on his brow. “And this Chanyeol over here may not know, but you do, Byun. If his presence here is your doing, as you in fact claim it is, what are you trying to achieve by playing with us all? You know the rules. You should be aware of the fact that two reflections shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the same side of the mirror and yet you’ve taken part in bringing this… person here? What has this city even done to you?”

“I’m trying to save Insomnia just as much as you do! Even more! At least I’m not hiding underground and selling my books to buy myself food like you and Luhan and all the remaining Blessed do.”

“We are trying to think and survive. Not all of us believe that penitence will bring us salvation.”

“Not all of us are to blame for Euphoria Syndrome spreading around town,” Luhan added, sweet and poisonous. “None of the Blessed ever stood on the Exalted’s side, Byun Baekhyun. Even his own mother turned her back on him. Only one of them betrayed us to join him, and now we all are paying for his mistakes.”

Baekhyun took the blow silently, without bending his head. “Even if you’re not to blame for what happened, you should still be working to fix it.”

“You’re not welcome here.”

“Oh, I am so grateful to know. How many times did you tell me?”

“The sooner we do what we came here to do, the sooner we’ll leave,” Chanyeol intervened. “So if you agreed to let us talk, then listen?”

Kyungsoo pressed his lips slightly, but ended up nodding in the end. He didn’t offer them a chair but he stood with them as he started talking. “I was curious about the Exalted’s reflection,” he admitted. “I wanted to know if it all was a trick, if it all was another of his and Byun’s plans to bring ruin upon us, but it is true to an extent that this man is not the Lord Haze we know. There’s something different in your magic, in the way your power is shaped - everything around the Exalted was noise. That’s why I let you in.”

So what? Haze’s voice whispered in Chanyeol’s head. So he can kill us? For all of his faults, Baekhyun is much more of a quick thinker, don’t you think? He came up with that idea way before.

Will you shut up? the boy thought back. “And what are you going to do now that we are here together?”

“It depends. What do you want?”

“To vanquish Haze,” Baekhyun replied without a second thought. “To stop him and the sickness he’s created, whatever the price.”

“And you?” Kyungsoo asked Chanyeol. “Have you studied the theory of reflections? Do you know what will happen to you when the Exalted is killed?”

Chanyeol lowered his gaze. “I don’t want to die,” he admitted. “I think that’s obvious, right? No one ever wants to unless they’ve lost the will to live. I don’t know how selfless I am, exactly. I don’t have a duty to this city, and I don’t want to sacrifice myself for it. So if you ask what I do want, then it is for Haze to leave me be. For him to take the shield he placed on me so I can travel through the mirror back to my version of things, and also for him to stop all this crap and release my mother from that sickness he infected her with. And for him to stop torturing Baekhyun, also.” The other boy shot him a look, but Chanyeol didn’t feel strong enough to gaze back. “What I want is Haze out of my life and of my head, but you know what? He won’t go. So I’ll kick him out. I’ll take his power and bury it down in a place where he can’t reach it, and then I’ll turn around and leave him behind.”

“So you want to incapacitate him but not kill him,” said Kyungsoo after a heavy pause. “And you want me and the people I represent to support you? Once more, why?”

“It’s a plan,” replied Sehun.

“It’s our only plan,” added Baekhyun.

Chanyeol smiled. “What do you have to lose?”

Kyungsoo didn’t seem that convinced, but he took Chanyeol and the others to the mirror room anyway.

Not matter how haughty he acted, it was obvious that the man was the keeper of a world in decadence. The inhabitants of that place had done their best to hide themselves and their treasures in a place where no one would find them, but their whole world was made of dust and ruins, the tapestries and pictures and antique parchments on the world so well preserved from The Purge, but barely no one there to look at them.

As Chanyeol walked behind Kyungsoo, he only saw two living people: a young girl with blue flames between her fingers and a middle-aged man who didn’t even look up from the pot where he was making plants grow. He was able to feel more, the presence of maybe two or three people more, just at the edge of his perception, but they were too few, a dying species.

Baekhyun had mentioned once that the tainted mist damaged the ones who could manipulate it the most. And wizards called themselves the Blessed, but in Insomnia everyone lied.

“We have seals activated,” Kyungsoo told them, once he had guided them to another polished metal door of plain steel. “No one with tainted blood will be able to walk in or out of the inner sanctum.”

“So you all are safe from Haze even if he decides to take a stroll out the mirror?” Baekhyun asked with a chuckle that didn’t reach his visible, very black eye.

“The mirror is covered,” Kyungsoo pointed out, tone still neutral. “But still, we have done our best to keep it safe, and to keep us safe from its influence. The Exalted’s miasma is a dangerous thing.”

“So we would be doing you a favor if we actually broke it, huh? One less old thing for you to keep.”

“I don’t know what to think about all this,” admitted Kyungsoo, tapping with one black boot on the carpeted floor. “Transferring the power from one reflection to another? Sending this Chanyeol back to his world and thus leaving the other powerless… I am sure such a plan will affect the balance somehow.”

“Do you really think it’ll make it worse than it is?” asked Baekhyun back. “I needed two things from you. One is books, and I’m sure you can provide. The second is a way for the world to escape Haze’s terror, and I’d like to think that at least the librarian of the Blessed Order has guts enough not to hide behind my own sins to justify his lack of activity.”

Kyungsoo’s fingers drummed on the steel of the gate. “Will you leave if I listen to you?” he asked. Chanyeol felt the urge to get in his head and turn down the volume of that heavy song of his, if only because it was too loud, and too clear, and felt so vulnerable. “If I go on with your plan and the Blessed Order collaborates in this alleged only way to bring the Exalted’s Reign to an end, would you go away after that?”

He was talking to both of them, but only Baekhyun’s melody faltered. “Of course,” he conceded, all pure-white energy. “I wouldn’t like to spend more than the time I strictly needed in a place that feels so much like a tomb. Give us what we ask for and we’ll be rushing to return under the rays of the sun. Isn’t it so, Chanyeol?”

“I guess so,” the boy agreed, because there wasn’t anything much he could have said.

I guess so, Haze echoed in his head.

Despite everything, Kyungsoo considered his options for a couple of seconds more. “Very well,” he accepted. “So you can’t ever say the Blessed Order haven’t tried their best to carry out every possible course of action. Once the sun rises, the Exalted’s reflection will walk into the Inner Sanctum and play his song. Tomorrow.”

So there you are, almost ready for the final verse of the Murder Melody, Haze’s voice whispered.

Chanyeol didn’t reply, not to him, not to Kyungsoo. His friend’s reflection seemed everything but trusting - what a good citizen he was, allowing himself to risk his life - and his own looked everything but afraid of what would happen when the sun came up. He had been granted permission, but he would still be completely alone at the inner sanctum at the other side of the gates. He was scared, he didn’t know what to do, but there was no other plan he could think of, so he nodded.

“It will do me good to rest for tonight. What time is it, anyway?”he said.

When he looked to his right, he found Baekhyun staring at him, expression unreadable but gaze so, so soft.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Chanyeol resisted the impulse to flinch his forehead, to make a face so he would smile. He hated the concept of Baekhyun being worried about him. “I’ll have to be,” he said in the end. “I’ll have to be.”

What Baekhyun remembered the most about his life before Haze came along was being sad and angry. Both of them came in turns, some days, and together when he was feeling the weakest, those times when the world was dull and grey and the only thing he wanted was to sleep until the edges of the world blurred and nothing was important anymore.

He had been good at lying back then, too, with the artless grace of the person who does something by instinct a lot: he lied to get what he wanted, lied so others would let him be, lied to say he was happy as he was. Haze was the only one to see through his untruthfulness and to offer him a place at his side. He hadn’t care if something inside of Baekhyun was that ugly - instead, he had told him he would turn him into an artist of deceit.

Baekhyun had wondered many times if there was a specific moment when his life, as he knew it and wanted it, had gone to hell. A point of no return of sorts, a place where he could have still turned back if only he had been brave enough to look at his sins in the face as he now did. He supposed that place would be somewhere in the months he spent with Haze, without caring that he wasn’t really loved, without wanting to see that their sacred mission wasn’t really the greater good.

There he should have stopped and listened to the signals, and maybe then he would have been able to stop Haze before The Purge, and so Insomnia would have been safe, the other Chanyeol would have never Traveled to that side and he wouldn’t be sitting in the Blessed Order’s library after midnight, his chest hurting while he tried to find a flicker of hope to cling to somewhere inside a useless pile of books.

“Shouldn’t you sleep?” a voice called.

Baekhyun shook his head as Sehun’s familiar figure came into the light. “I’ve gotten permission from Kyungsoo to check the library, but I had to promise we would leave this place tomorrow as soon as Chanyeol finished with the mirror,” he explained. “Did you know that Prosperan written and spoken forms started to change once the link between worlds was established? You have seen the classic writing system; it has nothing to do with the modern alphabet, right? Apparently there used to be a spoken tongue to go along with the old glyphs, but it got lost as the worlds at both ends of the mirror started to adapt to each other.”

“I never really paid attention in my history classes,” Sehun commented, with that silly, fake disdain of him, while he sat in the chair at the other side of his table.

“You could have learned this all by listening to Yixing while he speaks. He loves everything related to this topic, you know? He was the first one to inform me. He looked very excited to be talking to someone as notorious as I was, back when we first met.”

“The infamous bender of light.”

“Yeah. He looked so surprised that I was willing to listen, but I actually learned a lot about our two worlds. This one, the planet with an excess of magicians and not enough energy for them to use and the other, the world with so much energy and barely no wizards. It looked like a match made in heaven.”

“Does any of the things Yixing told you serve you now?” Sehun asked.

“Serve me for what?”

“Helping Park Chanyeol.”

“Well, I—” Baekhyun had came there for answers while Chanyeol slept, because he didn’t want him to know, but he had found more empty spaces than books, in the shelves he had rushed to look at. “I was wondering if there would be a way to undo the spell the ancient wizards casted, you know? That kind of thing. To make the link break and send everything back to the world where it originally belonged. I’ve been wanting to know for some time now, if such a thing would be possible.”

“Leaving this world without a source of magic.” Sehun made a face. “That is a cruel thing to wish for.”

“And still better than leaving this place at Haze’s mercy. How many wizards remain, anyway? All Blessed are silly, selfish beings - I wouldn’t feel bad for them if the thing they screwed two worlds for was finally taken away from them.”

“What about magitec?”

“Dispensable. But then now, what I want is just a tiny, unachievable possibility, huh? Better proceed with the original plan and send Chanyeol home once Haze has been stripped of his power and too weak to follow.”

Sehun was quiet for a moment as Baekhyun distracted himself by not-really-reading the pages of the open book in his lap. That library was the kind of place he loved and he couldn’t afford to be in often. He enjoyed the calm and the silence, almost as much as he liked the rows of books neatly ordered in shelves on the concave walls of the tunnel all around him, but quiet was just another thing he couldn’t regularly have. The universe he lived in was made of speed, blurred colors, desperation and pangs of pain in his chest.

“Are you okay?” Sehun asked.

Sehun, who was the only one who did not hate him. Chanyeol didn’t either, he believed. At least for then. The rest of the world just needed someone to blame.

There’s two things I’m keeping from you. Two and a half, to be very honest.

“I’m a bit tired,” he said. “The worlds were separated by Soul Magic, and I was trying to find something here about that, but for all their secrecy the Blessed Order surely enjoy getting rid of their antique volumes of knowledge in exchange for coin.”

“That wasn’t what I meant when I asked,” protested Sehun, looking practically offended.

“I know that. And I’m grateful that you worry about me, but I’m ready for whatever comes. Readier than you, I think.” They were in a tunnel of books, and Baekhyun loved that. All the names around them, all the words, had been relevant enough to make it to history, to be kept and cherished and preserved. “So here’s how we do it: Chanyeol breaks this mirror tomorrow, and that’s the weakest Haze gets so we go hunt him and break the last looking glass.”

“I thought there were only four?”

“And then what about the mirror Haze’s been using to appear in our faces? He kept one for himself, besides the one I stole from him. So Chanyeol and I go and defeat him, and then he Travels across and breaks that mirror as he does. After that, it’ll be done.”

“Can’t I protest? Be opposed to this plan as everyone should be?”

Baekhyun shrugged. “You know I’m stubborn.”

Sehun was a darling boy, but as hard as he tried, there were things he wouldn’t understand. Chanyeol did, even if he didn’t realize, but he wouldn’t fully comprehend what was at stake if Baekhyun didn’t speak, and he didn’t want to. He thought about it as he left the library and Sehun behind and headed back to the tiny, closed space of tunnel the Blessed Order had given them as a shared guest room - Chanyeol was waiting for him to come clean, without pressuring him, just being there, and the thing Baekhyun wanted the most, his own forbidden, hidden wish was to let it out.

Only two people had ever clearly seen to his perfectly constructed web of lies: Haze, who had told him he would turn him into the best cheater in the world and then Chanyeol, who had looked so certain while he told him he’d be the first to be honest, because someone had to. Revealing deep hidden truths was pretty much like getting naked, and he had always been used to covering up every inch of skin.

He knew that Chanyeol worked too much, that he tried to conceal it too, but that he was terrified. Such a brave boy he was, always wearing his heart up his sleeve. Baekhyun had watched him twitch in a restless sleep when they shared that old metro car, and he had watched him fight, and there were few people he could honestly admit he admired, but he was so glad he had met that one.

Haze had always been the bright flame, the grand genius with a plan for the world to change, but Chanyeol was the warm, steady fire. And as happened with all good things, warmth was underrated.

Even by him, once upon a time, but no more.

“I don’t know what Haze wants with Chanyeol, Sehunnie,” Baekhyun had admitted, just before leaving the library some minutes ago. “But whatever it is, sure as hell I’m not letting him have it.”

“I’m more than fine about you helping Chanyeol, but what about yourself?” Sehun had replied. Poor Sehun, always worrying about those he shouldn’t be concerned about.

“I am not relevant here.”

“Have you at least told him?”

Two things. Two secrets he was keeping. Two secrets and a half that he hid where it was safe. “What am I to tell him? I can’t. I am scared, you know? About what he’ll think of me.”

Don’t you think Chanyeol would have liked my reflection better?

Sehun didn’t understand. Chanyeol probably would, but he wouldn’t support him. And there were things he needed to do, because he could and because he had to. Despite being barely more than a hidden cave under the city’s core, and even though it was unpopulated and in ruins, there was something about the colored rugs and old pieces of parchment and books that he liked about the headquarters of the Blessed Order. It felt like a place he could have belonged in, once upon a time, had he not been an outcast for the world.

But then what am I to do, right?

The space of the tunnel the Blessed had given them to sleep was barely more than a corner separated from the rest of the corridor by a dark red curtain - probably the old quarters of some wizard who had already fallen to the tainted mist. It was simple and not especially comfortable, but Baekhyun had loved the simplicity of the cushions of the floor, and Chanyeol had been too tired to even protest before he had collapsed over them and started snoring. There was something warm about returning to that scene, and he felt stupidly shy as he opened the curtain to walk into their narrow shared space.

His pulse was drumming in his ears but, just like that, it stopped, and cold swept under his skin.

The room at the other side of the curtain was empty, Chanyeol’s side of the cushion bed unmade but already cold. And Baekhyun knew that something like that shouldn’t be necessary alarming; he had been awake and up past midnight too, but he hadn’t seen Chanyeol outside - not in the library, not in the corridors, not anywhere - and his black guitar case wasn’t in the place against the wall where he had last left it.

Swallowing past the knot in his throat, he turned to leave. It was then that he heard the scream.

The song and the noise were calling Chanyeol.

It was as it had been years ago, when he was a small kid in a black suit meant for a funeral. He had dreamed about that a thousand times and the nightmare, as everything else, had come back, strong and clear, and irresistible pull. So he woke up.

He wasn’t in his room that time, but in that strange alcove made of mismatched cushions and blankets, buried deep in the core of a black, black mountain. That meant he didn’t know the way to the voice, but its whispers were there to guide him anyway, in a part of his mind where he couldn’t block them.

Come meet me, will you? Let the Murder Melody in. I’ve been training you for this.

The corridors outside his room were empty, but his naked feet made almost no noise on the rugs that covered the floor as he grabbed his guitar case and stepped out. A crack came out under the door of blankets that separated the library from the rest of the tunnel, but he ignored it, going straight for the only proper door in the place: the steel gates at the far bottom.

Kyungsoo-the-librarian had said that only one without taint in his veins could walk through those doors, but Chanyeol’s rot wasn’t in his body but somewhere in his mind, where it could not be traced, and so the polished steel parted in two to let him in as soon as he touched it and issued the command for it to open.

The room beyond was small and round, a sanctuary in the form of a circular cave dug from the stone. Water trickled down the walls, purifying, and mist clung to his legs, swirling as he walked. The mirror was in a raised platform in the very center of the room, a tall thing framed in silver and with a glass so black as the mountain around them.

At the other side of it and dressed in pristine white stood the Exalted.

“So you came,” he said. “To fulfill your duty. To play a song for me. What a good, good child you are.”

Chanyeol knew he had to. Maybe not exactly like that, but he had to. The song made of remnants of noise was telling him to, and the nightmare was moving his strings, but he didn’t understand why Haze would want him to do the only thing that would destroy him. And still, he didn’t fight. Strangely detached from the scene he was the center of, he watched his body kneel and take his guitar of of its case, the lights so bright in the darkness when he turned it on and placed his fingers on the strings.

“You want me to break the mirrors for you,” he said, because even in his nightmares he got to keep his voice. Usually.

At the other side of the looking glass, Haze smiled. “It’s not optimal, but it’s been convenient. Breaking these mirrors can destroy me, but it can also enthrone me. Grant me my wish once and for all. So I’ve been training you, waiting for you, since Baekhyun brought you to me.”

Chanyeol’s fingers pressed on the frets of his guitar, and the music took shape over the noise, one note bleeding into another, chord after chord. It was his melody, but it was twisted, wrong. He wanted to wake up, but he could not.

“You have a wish?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Don’t we all?” Haze gave him a wolfish grin. His hair was pushed back again - he looked so different from what Chanyeol had ever been. “I had a wish, a wish for happiness. But what is worse than craving for the greater good and realizing that neither the world nor you are strong enough to turn your vision into reality?”

Chanyeol uselessly tried to shake his head. His body was not his, his fingers danced on the strings. He needed to wake up, but his brain had been unwired. “Breaking these mirrors will kill you,” he said. “That’s what Baekhyun thinks.”

“And he’s not wrong. He’s rather clever, for a replacement. But of course, he’s more egoistic than selfless - he does things for the sense of forgiveness that they’ll bring him, rather than the welfare of those around him, and so he doesn’t think as much as he should.”

“You don’t know him.”

“Ah, but I do and he’s weak. Impulsive. He realized that my power dwells in intact mirrors while you get strength from the act of breaking them, but he failed to see that our souls are one and the same, linked by the thread of our magic. You might be immune to Soul Magic, but you’re not free of my influence inside you. We have a bond, Park Chanyeol, and I’m the one in your head, the reflection that knows how to control it while you toss and turn in your sleep.”

“What do you want that bond for?” Chanyeol asked. He was barely conscious of the fact that he should be alarmed and scared, pinching himself awake and going for Baekhyun, but his limbs were heavy his eyes blurring anything else that wasn’t Haze’s scornful face.

“Because of your world. The energy in it. I need to open a gate to get it and you’re the key I require. A whole soul, both sides of the coin. So let the Soul Melody play louder, make the Murder Melody rise.”

Chanyeol’s face remained neutral. His fingers hurt. His song was so loud, so twisted, so broken. Wake me up. “There’s something I don’t understand,” he whispered. The black mirror was splintering, but there were no cracks on Haze’s face. The crystal surface trembled and undulated around him, but he remained still, a marble statue. “I understand the Soul part, but why call my song Murder Melody if the objective is not to kill but to control?”

Haze chuckled. “My lovely, innocent, boy. It was my personal choice, and I named it that way because we are murdering a person. Don’t you have any idea of who it is?”

Mr. Huang. Colonel Suho. His mother. Baekhyun. “I won’t let you.”

The mirror cracked. Haze’s smile turned wolfish. “Ah, but how will you stop it when this whole thing is about killing you?”

The glass in front of him broke, shards flying everywhere. They dug into the skin of his arms, his cheek, his neck, biting so deep that he screamed. There was noise in his head, a shriek like a banshee’s scream, that came from the mirror and took hold in his brain, cutting the last threads of consciousness like it was biting them off, tearing skin and soul away as he went.

That was the moment when he woke up. That was the instant when he found himself in his coat of cushions, with Baekhyun staring over him and asking if he was okay, and he lied. But the world was switching off, blurring, and he couldn’t register himself doing it, but he heard his own voice screaming. He had to be dreaming, he had to be, he had to be; Haze had control when he slept but not anywhere else, so it couldn’t be. He didn’t want to listen, but his voice was in his head, and he knew Haze couldn’t kill him, wouldn’t kill him, but that all had never been about actual, physical death.

Let me in, Haze had repeated, and he was in.

It’s about controlling or getting controlled. And Chanyeol couldn’t move.

You can either submit or have complete dominion. Two parts of one soul, one weak reflection.

And it was him. It couldn’t be him. No, no, no, no.

He couldn’t see. He couldn’t see. He was falling.

The world had turned white. The beep in his ears wouldn’t stop.

And then there was silence.

Baekhyun was the third person to arrive, his throat raw and his chest so cold it burned. Glyphs had appeared in the metallic surface of the door leading to the inner sanctum, fire red traced over silver. He had taught himself to read the symbols, could recognize the traces of a seal - for protection against evil. Corruption.

The screams, in a voice he recognized, were coming from the other side.

“What’s going on here?” he exclaimed, rushing towards the door.

Someone grabbed him by the arms, keeping him still even though he tried to fight. Sehun.

“No one is allowed to step into that room, Byun,” said Kyungsoo. He was standing in front of the closed gates, and Baekhyun couldn’t see his face from where he was, but he knew him well enough to recognize inflexibility in his voice. “The taint has invaded the inner sanctum.”

Chanyeol should have been sleeping. The boy he knew would have waited until he was told to walk into the mirror room. He didn’t like to use his powers to the point it made him sick. He didn’t like confronting Haze, or fighting if he could avoid it. Chanyeol wouldn’t have gone by his own will.

Chanyeol wouldn’t get himself trapped when no one could help him.

Chanyeol wouldn’t be screaming.

Chanyeol shouldn’t be screaming.

He had been overworking himself but he could endure it.

He was okay when he had left.

If he hadn’t left—

“Haze!” Baekhyun called out loud. “Haze has him. He did something to him, he’s still doing it right now! We have to help him, we have to take him out of that room!”

“He won’t be able to walk out until his body is free of taint. If it ever is,” replied Kyungsoo, voice neutral. “And none of us will be walking in there!”

“For fuck’s sake, shut up! Don’t you ever get tired of being this self-righteous when you and your people never do a thing to help? Because I, for once, am fucking done with you!” Sehun was still holding him in place, but he had nothing to do against someone with so little to lose. He called his own broken Blessing, absorbing the traces of white mist from the air into his system, and his chest hurt like an overheated engine but the light came, pure and blinding. It was too bright in the semi darkness, and came too fast for Sehun to close his eyes, so the boy grunted, hurt and blinded, and Baekhyun elbowed him with all his strength and broke free. He had left his cane at Jongdae’s store as a sign of good faith to the Blessed, but now he wished he had brought it so he could stab Kyungsoo in the guts with it.

“Librarian Do, what’s happening?” Luhan’s voice called. He was rushing towards them across the tunnel, followed by three Blessed more, all sleepy and pale and willingly ignorant.

Kyungsoo simply snapped his fingers and the patch of stone between the upcoming group and the door rose up like a wall, blocking their way and leaving Sehun, Baekhyun and himself locked in stone in front to the door. “I am not risking the lives of my people to the Exalted’s miasma,” he stated.

At the other side of the gates, Chanyeol kept screaming. Baekhyun bit his lip so hard he was sure it drew blood. “Seriously, fuck you.” His light flickered under his skin, useless, but he pushed Kyungsoo away anyway and pressed his hands against the hot glyphs on the door.

Issue a command. All that magitec doors required was for the Blessed to issue a command, but instead of opening beneath his palms, the burning steel charred the skin of his hands, making him cry out in pain.

He couldn’t cross the gates.

“Chanyeol!” he called.

He could almost make out the words that were being screamed at the other side. No, no, no, like a litany, a terrible cadence. No, oh god, no, he thought as well.

“Stars,” Sehun cursed, going for him again, trying to take him away from the door.

“Pray to those stars for him to vanish the taint inside him,” Kyungsoo said, so matter of factly that Baekhyun would have killed him.

“Chanyeol!” he called out again. He was on his own at the other side of the door, but he wasn’t alone. He wouldn’t allow it. “Whatever he’s doing to you, don’t let him win! Wake up, you hear me? Wake up!”

There was another long, agonizing scream.

And then, his heartbeat and silence.

—

“Wake up! Chanyeol, wake up!”

The sunlight had dyed his eyelids red, which made his eyes itch, but he still felt too comfortable to open them. Was five minutes more too much to ask for a boy as busy as he was? He had just finished his exams, he needed a little break for the effort.

“Seriously, Chanyeol, wake up! We’re in trouble.”

Chanyeol opened one eye, only because he was feeling merciful that morning. His room came into focus, the window open to let the early spring air in. The dreamcatcher his mother had hung from the frame on his birthday was still there, hanging stupidly because he always forgot to take it off - he had been forgetting to do so for months now - but he had put it there to indulge her after she had been charged way too much for it at a fair and he was starting to find it endearing.

Oh, well.

“What time is it?” he muttered.

Right when he was thinking about endearing things he loved, Baekhyun’s messy mop of ash-brown hair appeared in his field of vision - along with the rest of him. He always looked so soft in the mornings, with his dark eyes still clouded by sleep and his skin so warm. Coincidentally, he was wearing one of Chanyeol’s old t-shirts now (in retaliation for Chanyeol stealing his hoodie to go out the night before), which was one of his favorite things in the world.

“What do you think? Noon,” Baekhyun replied, looking conveniently upset.

“Hey, and why the frown? I thought we only had to meet Sehun and the guys for rehearsal at like… eight in the evening or something? We’re up just in the time for lunch.”

Baekhyun punched him in the shoulder. “Let me remind you that you bribed me into your place last night by telling me there would be an Overwatch marathon this morning. Ranked games. You spent the time you should have dedicated to me, carrying you in ranked, sleeping.”

“We could have done that if we had gone to sleep earlier last night. Which we didn’t, by the way, because of you.” Chanyeol raised his eyebrows at him, pretending to be shocked, and reproachful, and maybe a bit of both. “I have the stamina of a regular man, Byun, even if you are superhuman or something. Everything hurts, you know, I need to rest and recover and all before I’m all yours again.”

The little fucker had the nerve to look so proud of himself. “You’re whining.”

“I don’t whine. I’m a Gryffindor.”

“Have you ever paid attention to the Gryffindors in the Harry Potter books? Seriously, Park.”

The world was such a beautiful place, frowning Baekhyun and all. Especially when they were much more happy than angry and were wearing his shirt.

“If you want me to carry you at Overwatch or any other online game of your choosing, you only need to ask nicely,” he said, pulling from Baekhyun’s arm until the other boy was practically on him on the bed, close enough to be kissed. Baekhyun’s lips parted against his as soon as they touched, so soft and so warm and so perfect. “So tell me something,” he whispered when they parted, keeping the boy oh so close. “Am I supposed to be in trouble because you’ve had to cancel our Overwatch marathon? Is that the reason?”

Baekhyun’s smile turned mischievous. “Not really,” he said against his ear, moving to kiss the soft skin below. “But do you really want to know?”

“Well, I guess?” Chanyeol shivered. “I suppose? Maybe? I always want to know.”

That was when he heard the knocks on his door, and Baekhyun chuckled against his skin. The bastard.

“Son, are you awake?” his mother’s voice said. “Can I come in?”

Chanyeol’s eyes opened wide. If he had invited Baekhyun home the night before it had been precisely because his mother was supposed to be working in a long turn until late in the afternoon. Or so he thought. It should be so, because he had checked her schedule carefully… or that was what he believed, at least.

“Hey mom,” he replied, voice shaky as a chuckling Baekhyun buried his head in the crook of his neck. “And actually you can’t. I’m, um, naked.”

Which he more or less was. On top of having Baekhyun there, of course, shaking like he was going to burst out laughing at every second. He was wondering what he could do, and if shoving his boyfriend and all of his stuff into the closet would be a viable option when the door fell open. “Come on, darling, I brought you into this world, it’s not like— Oh.”

Baekhyun sat up on the bed and actually beamed. “Good morning, Mrs. Park.”

“Ah, hi Baekhyunnie, did you stay for the night?”

“Yup! It had been a while since I did, so.”

It had, in fact, been a while since Chanyeol’s mother had run into Baekhyun and him being in the same room, and last time hadn’t been as bad as that. And he had imagined it could happen, eventually, but he hadn’t expected Baekhyun to be so natural about the whole situation and his mother of all people to be okay with it. Although he should have. Baekhyun was Baekhyun and his mother had always liked him.

“I’m happy to see you are getting along. I had almost lost hope with this one until you appeared, but I see he’s not a total lost case. Now that you’re here, do you want a cup of coffee?”

Chanyeol hid himself under his rumpled blankets. “Mom, please.”

“Do you have lemon tea?” Baekhyun asked, standing up. “I’ve been having americano lately because of exams, but if I can avoid that…”

"Of course, darling.”

“Well, let me get my pants and I’ll join you soon. Deal?” The door clicked closed and Chanyeol stuck out his head from his fortress of blankets. “You coming?” Baekhyun asked while he got his discarded jeans from the floor.

“You’re ganging up with her against me?”

“Just accepting an offer for invigorating drinks, Chanyeol. It’s a much better option than blushing and acting like someone just walked on you having sex.”

“Oh, god, Byun. She actually didn’t—”

“Join us in five, okay?”

Baekhyun winked an eye at him and left his bedroom with his old t-shirt still on. Chanyeol supposed he should be at least a little frustrated by the whole situation, but the truth was he felt too happy to care. His exams had gone well, he was still better than Baekhyun at Overwatch, he had been promoted to store manager at his videogame shop part-time job, his band was doing great and his mother and friends liked his boyfriend.

He got up, fishing his jeans from the floor and deciding for a clean shirt and hoodie from his closet - his mother was at home after all. The air was still a bit chilly, despite the spring setting in, so he walked to his window with the intention of closing it.

The street was bursting with life down below, something that he had always liked. The city was busy no matter the time of the day, cars going up and down the street and pedestrians talking, barely bigger than ants from that spot.

There’s no park, he thought. No frozen fountain. No silence.

He shook his head, frowning, and pushed the window closed before heading out.

Baekhyun was already sitting with his mother in the kitchen, Chanyeol’s favorite Pikachu mug between his nimble fingers, filled with probably tea. Sunlight came through the windows and casted his face in light.

The world was such a beautiful place.

Full of happiness, without a trace of pain.

“You’ve stolen my cup,” Chanyeol observed.

“Indulge me,” the other boy said. “I’d ask you to share, but I haven’t come this far just to give up half of my obligatory good morning drink, I’m afraid.”

“Nah, I need my whole cup of caffeine, don’t worry about that.”

His mother’s gaze travelled from him to Baekhyun, and then to him again. “Aren’t your exams over, darling? Didn’t you sleep well tonight?” Chanyeol stopped where he was at the door and tried to smile. As naturally as he could. “Do I have to give you the speech about safe intercourse again?”

“Oh my god, mom!” His mother seemed to love embarrassing him. Exactly like that. At least, Baekhyun laughed out loud. The amount of chill that guy had seemed to be endless.

“What, am I not allowed to ask if my son has been using protection?”

“Mom!”

“Don’t worry, he has been.”

“Even for oral?”

“MOM!”

Chanyeol had to cover his eyes with his hands, hoping that at least that would hide the fact that he wanted to lock himself in his room and never, ever, come out. He had never asked for a mother that made him felt awkward, or for a boyfriend that was completely unashamed in certainly weird situations, but he guessed he was lucky to have them both in his life after all.

Lucky.

Happy.

The world was such a beautiful place.

“I need to know. Better safe than sorry, son,” his mother was saying. “Bad things could happen if you’re not careful enough. You could be sick. Or your demons could get to you.”

Ah?

Chanyeol looked from between his fingers. His mother’s hair, that had been neatly combed back a second ago, was falling onto her eyes.

“Mom?” he asked. When he blinked, she was normal again.

“Are you okay, Park? You look unwell,” Baekhyun asked, looking all adorable in his old shirt, his hair still a mess.

“I guess. I am.”

He could hear a faint song close by, like one of their neighbors was playing music and the sound filtered through the walls. He didn’t really want to focus on that, but the more he did, the more he felt something was off. Baekhyun looked messy and relaxed, like he always did (like Chanyeol wanted him to be) but if he stared hard enough he could see a second boy overlapping with that one. A Baekhyun with his left eye covered, dressed in a perfectly pressed suit.

“Darling, you look pale,” his mother said, clearly worried.

Chanyeol took one step back, and then another, until he was back in the corridor. The walls were white, all white, no crosses drawn at all.

“When did we paint the house?” he asked. “Or change the windows?”

“Darling, what are you saying?” His mother looked so worried, so scared. “We never changed the windows, and the walls… You painted them together with your father and sister last month. Don’t you remember that?”

That seemed logical. He remembered that, in his mind and in his heart. But it was not true, it couldn’t be. “My father and sister are dead.”

He looked up again and saw his mother with her hair falling all over her face. Baekhyun with an eyepatch under his perfectly styled hair. And crosses in the hallway, and the windows painted black.

The world was such a beautiful place.

The world was such an ugly place.

He was seeing two realities at the same time, and he wanted to forget one, as much as he craved to live in the other. He took another step back.

“What’s wrong? Come play with me,” Baekhyun said.

“Give in into what you desire,” his mother added. And it was her voice, but it wasn’t her. His mother, as he knew her, would never say that.

He could still hear that faint song, such a terrible mess of notes and chords. He didn’t like it, he was afraid to tune himself into it, but the clearer it was, the more the world around him unraveled.

“You should choose to be happy.”

“You should choose your life to be painless.”

“Because the world is such an ugly place.”

“But you can stay here and believe it’s beautiful.”

He was Park Chanyeol, the unluckiest boy in the world, and he could close his ears to the music and stay in a place where his mother was sane and Baekhyun trusted and wanted him. He wanted it so much that his chest ached for it, and that was the reason it all was being shown to him.

That was the core of the liar’s game, the true meaning of the Murder Melody, and he needed to choose if he would listen or not.

Listen or not.

“Give in, darling, give in.”

Chanyeol was so scared. He closed his eyes. “Haze.”

He grabbed the discordant threads of the song in his heart and turned them into a scream. And then, like a mirror, the illusion cracked.

Chanyeol was back in the white room, body against a glass-cold wall, Haze’s pale right hand on his neck and cheeks wet with tears. He couldn't breath, he was suffocating, and everything he could see was his reflection's dark, dark eyes on his.

They were in Chanyeol's mind. He wasn't dreaming anymore but trapped in his own brain. He was scared.

“You're a fool,” Haze hissed, keeping him in place while he cut his supply of air. Chanyeol needed to move, he needed to resist but his limbs were not responding and his lungs burned. “You should have stayed in the life I created for you. You should have accepted my mercy.”

“No,” whispered Chanyeol. “No.” His own fingers closed around Haze’s, fingernails digging in skin. “I won't let you destroy me. I will never allow you to use my powers, or my body, or anything that's mine for your big, fat lie.”

The smile on Haze's face was more of a grimace than a smirk, a clean-cut in his pale, familiar face. “Don't deceive yourself,” he whispered, moving close to do so over his ear while Chanyeol's hands found purchase on his chest. He breathed in. “If you had the power to remove all the ugliness in this world, wouldn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t,” murmured Chanyeol. “I can’t.”

“Ah, but it can be done. The most wonderful thing about Soul Magic is that it affects the mind, the emotions. If there’s a feeling that it’s not worthy of being in the human psyche, people like you and I have the possibility to erase it. So it doesn’t hunt mankind anymore.”

Chanyeol shook his head. He could breathe, he could move if he tried. Haze might still be the powerful one, but they were in his brain. “You’re not saving the world; you’re breaking it. You’re making people sick, both in my city and in yours.”

“Because I don’t have enough energy. Don’t you see? I need more power, certain things need to be sacrificed for others to grow. And you know that, deep in your heart, you understand. Because I am the same thing you are. I know the things you crave for. And I gave them to you and you were happy.”

Taking a shaky breath, Chanyeol closed his eyes. He was scared, so scared. He was ashamed of the things he wanted, and afraid of the things he didn’t want. “No, you are the one who doesn’t understand. I may want all that, deep down, but it’s not real. And it doesn’t matter how you change my perception, or how much you deceive or play with my mind, it still won’t be. It will never be, not like this.”

Rage swirled under Haze’s face, like curls of miasma, thick white instead of black. “The world will change if I command it to. It will, starting with you.”

Desperate, aren’t you? Chanyeol’s tightened his grip, and Haze’s smirk faltered when the boy pushed his hand down, twisting it between them. He would have laughed. He wanted to laugh. And he did, humorlessly, as the walls of the white room around them trembled, as if stricken by an earthquake. “You know, there’s a thing I’ve gotten about all of your speeches. No matter how hard you try to convince me, when it comes to you versus me, and when it comes to my life, this all is not about controlling or being controlled. It’s about me keeping my own mind in check and fighting it every day. And yes, I am unlucky, and afraid, but you know what? I am about to face the fear I’ve been running away from.”

“You will never get it,” Haze hissed. “You’re weak and ignorant. You must be eliminated.”

“No.” They were in Chanyeol’s mind, as and such he commanded the white walls to crack and fall, like they were made of glass and he was smashing them with a hammer. A crack appeared at the corner of Haze’s left eye, cutting hardened skin as it travelled down. There had been neither sound nor noised in that closed space, but Chanyeol was starting to hear the music. “I might be the weakest reflection, but I won’t be letting you in. I don’t want you in my nightmares anymore.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Haze exclaimed, as Chanyeol’s hand closed on the front of his white coat and he was pulled in, eye to eye and forehead to forehead.

“Ah, but I do,” the boy said. Haze’s face was cracking, the walls were crumbling. And there was darkness beyond, and Chanyeol embraced it. He still wanted to laugh, and to cry. “You’re so alone.”

Haze’s eyes opened wide. “You don’t understand. My world is—”

His mouth fell open. His face cracked. And Chanyeol grabbed onto the pain in his chest as he pushed his conscience forward and into him.

The world was such a beautiful place, and Chanyeol was special.

He was meant to do great things, or so he had been told. From birth, he had been trained to know his powers and to control them, so he could bring pride to Insomnia and the Prosperan Empire, to be the flame of the world both in peace and war.

He could Travel through mirrors, but he was never allowed. “You are not the one who will have to, if the need arises. You’re too precious, darling,” his mother always said. So he turned into Soul Magic and noise instead, and the things he could do with them.

He could made the happy sad, and turn grief into happiness. He could calm the angry, and solve conflict with a simple gesture and a stare, and a second of noise directed into the brain. He was loved and respected, he was the new Exalted of Insomnia, and everyone wanted to see him and to talk to him. It was tiresome, but Kyungsoo and Sehun were there for him once the crews went back home, and his father always told him the stories of past heroes before he went to bed, which made his days worthwhile.

“You will be the next one, you’ll see,” he always told him. “The next great hero of Insomnia. Our savior if the need arises.”

And Chanyeol had believed. He was special, yes, and being special was so hard sometimes, but he was happy overall.

—

The official sources said it had been an accident, but Chanyeol didn’t believe it.

If it had been, his mother wouldn’t have been so concerned about Chanyeol’s personal car exploding, even though he hadn’t been in. If it had been, she would have grieved Chanyeol’s father and sister much more, instead forbidding her remaining son to go to their funeral and locking him in.

If it had been, Chanyeol would have been allowed to go out and wouldn’t be surrounded by guards who didn’t touch him and didn’t talk to him.

Chanyeol just wanted to mourn. He wanted to fix things. His father had always told him that he was special, a genius and a hero, and still he hadn’t been able to bring him and Yoora back to life. Doing that was out of his reach, he had been told. It was something that even the Exalted couldn’t do.

So he had cried alone, hoping the pain would pass, and had cried more when it hadn’t. He had stayed awake at night and tried to conjure that damn feeling out of his head, but it hadn’t left.

Soul Mages couldn’t be affected by Soul Magic, not by the regular kind. And he wasn’t strong enough. Not to help others, nor to ease his own pain.

What a useless hero he was.

—

Manipulating the minds of his guards was as simple as playing with lifeless toys. He had manipulated the noise, shaped it and turned into something they couldn’t unhear, and when he had had their minds in his hands, he had issued the command.

“Take me to a mirror.”

Mirrors were forbidden for him as he wasn’t allowed to leave Insomnia, but he had never wanted a door, only a window. He had been lost in hopelessness until he had remembered his lessons and seen a flicker of light.

There were two worlds, everyone had a reflection. The balance was there, but perhaps something could be done. Maybe if he intervened he could adjust it. Make it all better.

So he hummed to the mirror, and someone at the other side replied with a song.

A boy his age, with his same face, black hair and huge, dark eyes. His reflection, unknowing, and scared and so normal it hurt.

“Are your father and sister alive?” he had asked, and he had wanted to curse when his other self had nodded, but he had clung to his thread of hope anyway. He hadn’t been able to save his family in his world, but perhaps he would be able to do so somewhere else. That would make it better: he would be happier if his reflection was. He would play the hero for another version of his dad, and he would save the day. “You have to listen to me. Your father will die. Your sister will die. It’s about the balance and you have to avoid it.”

His reflection had looked so scared - so stupid, so useless - and the only thing had done had been closing the link between the mirrors and running away.

Chanyeol had thought that he would still help, perhaps, but the next time he had opened his window to see him, that silly boy had been dressed for a funeral.

The world is such an ugly place, Chanyeol had thought, and perhaps special people didn’t deserve to be happy.

His other self seemed eager to run away from who he was and from the power that ringed in his veins, like he strived to be ordinary. And they were not the same person, of course, Chanyeol wasn’t as weak as that reflection of his, but they both shared the core of their souls, and he didn’t want the other boy to forget it.

Soul Mages couldn’t be affected by Soul Magic, that was the cardinal rule. But the reflections of Mirror Travelers were linked, even when they stood a world apart.

So he didn’t tell anyone, not when everyone wanted the Exalted to forget that another side existed, but he slipped into his other self’s dreams and reminded him of his sins in the shape of nightmares.

—

Normal people had to live in the world as it was, no matter how unfair or painful, but Chanyeol was allowed to shape it.

Not everything, of course: he was not a regular Blessed and thus he had no element to control. Freezing water, or to setting wood aflame, or to making seeds grow on the earth were easy tasks for the other chosen few and, even though they were impossible for him, there were other things he could do. He was a master of emotion, he had control over the human mind, and he could not create forests or destroy shores with tidal waves, but he could reshape and rewire.

He sensed discomfort, distress, anger and sadness like every person he crossed paths with was sending him a signal. He couldn’t do a thing to make his own pain disappear, and he hadn’t been able to fix the other world, but he was starting to think that the other side of the mirror and his stupid, childish reflection weren’t worth his while, and so he should start helping the ones that mattered. In Insomnia, the city he was meant to rule.

So he started his crusade. He did it with a servant girl first, digging deep in her mind until he uprooted the source of her grief - pain over a family lost in the same incident that had taken the lives of his father and sister as well. She didn’t need that, and he erased it, but his technique wasn’t perfect and she turned into crystal.

She had been smiling when she died, at least, her lips curved up in the face of a sculpture carved in glass.

“So a failure, eh? This is more difficult that I thought it’d be.”

He made progress, steadily. The advantage of being locked in ‘until the authorities deemed that it was okay for him to go out safely’ was that everything happened behind closed walls. So what if one or two servants and soldiers disappeared once in a while? What if others had drastic changes of humor? It wouldn’t be the prince; it couldn’t be the prince: he was too young and still grieving.

He perfected his technique. He purged the darkness and the anger and the grief off them and watched the dark miasma leaving their bodies once his job was done. All the bad things, disappearing. All the feelings that made people suffer, off and away.

Among all people, he had expected at least his friends to understand when he finally gathered the courage to show them. He called one of his guards, the last afternoon they came to his mansion to play, and then performed the extraction. He made him happy. Euphoric.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he asked, smiling. “He is not sad anymore.”

Sehun was still too young, but Kyungsoo had always been a clever kid. He had been coming less and less to play, burdened by his own training as the next librarian for the Blessed Order, but he was a wizard too, and Chanyeol had taken for granted that he would understand.

Only he didn’t.

“What’s wrong with the mist?” he said, watching the black fog that came out from the guard’s body, and ushering Sehun to hide behind him. “What have you done to that man? Why is he laughing like that?”

“It still needs to be perfected, but I made him happy,” Chanyeol tried to explain. He was so satisfied with his improvements, and he wanted Kyungsoo to be proud, but his friend draped his arms around Sehun’s shape and stepped back.

Away from him.

“You have to undo that. That mist is wrong. That man is wrong. Undo that.”

“What? No! He’s better now!”

He tried to explain, he really did, but Kyungsoo was looking at him like he didn’t know him, and he felt the bitter taste of sadness and betrayal in his tongue. His friends were corrupted too, it seemed, damaged by evil feelings as the rest of the world was.

“Chanyeol, whatever it is you’ve done, we have to tell your mom. She’s a healer, she’ll fix it.”

“No, you don’t understand. Let me show you!”

Extracting the corruption of pain from Kyungsoo seemed the way to go, but his friend cursed when he saw him coming. With a flick of his hand, he made the earth between himself and Chanyeol rise, sending the boy stumbling back with a shocked scream.

He didn’t want that. Kyungsoo didn’t want his help. He would leave with Sehun, he knew, and none of his friends would come back.

Chanyeol wanted to cry, but his own tears were something he couldn’t erase so he held them in.

His plan was not for them, but he had to keep going.

“So be it,” he whispered. “So be it.”

—

He unwillingly turned his mother sick.

That was what happened with all of his failed experiments, with the people who became happier but not quite: they forgot grief and pain, they laughed and smiled and danced, but eventually they lost track of who they were, and their conscience faded, and their skin started to harden and splinter and turn to glass.

Such a thing happened because he was still young and inexperienced. He had neither the skill nor the power, but that also meant he needed time and subjects to practice, and there was nothing he could do if some of them got sick or died. It was a necessary evil for the greater good, but his mother didn’t understand that.

“Chanyeol, Kyungsoo told him. You’ve been tainted by miasma, son. You need to come with me. We’ll take care of you, all right? Just leave us in charge of everything.”

She had come with more people - guards. She had brought magitec chains. She wanted to restrain him, stop him, treat him like a madman. It hurt that she thought like that, it hurt that she was acting upon it. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt, so bad and so sharp, and so he used his full strength on her.

She was a powerful healer, but he was the Exalted of Insomnia and he won the fight. But she was sick, her skin hardening by the second, and she wanted to live so she ran.

His mother left. The service left. The guards he had no mindpower to control went along with them.

He heard, days after, that his own mother had declared the title of Exalted null and had declared martial law in Insomnia. Another betrayal to his personal little list, another person who had been dear to him and that had stabbed him in the back in the end.

He still had the Exalted’s mansion however. He still had his useless title and his growing strength, and he wouldn’t give those up, so he covered his headquarters in black mist and buried himself inside.

The Blessed sent him a young man by the time Chanyeol was fifteen, a person by the name of Zhang Yixing, a gifted scholar who specialized in the balance between worlds.

“You might not know, Mr. Park, but the way you are using your power is affecting the bond between this side of the looking glass and the other,” he explained to him. “According to the research we have conducted, your Mirror Traveler abilities are influencing your use of Soul Magic.”

“What does that mean?” asked Chanyeol. He didn’t like that man: he seemed barely older than him by one or two years, but still smelled like old parchment and looked at him like he distrusted him - which he did, Chanyeol could feel it in the noise of his soul. The Blessed had allegedly sent him as a peace offering, because every wizard in town was part of their silly Order by default, but the Blessed wanted him to fall, and, as kind as his face was, that man was no exception.

“What I intend to say is that you are apparently drawing energy from the bond between worlds. You require too much energy for your… Soul Magic practices, Mr. Park, and what you do affects the welfare of people at the other side of the looking glass.”

“I don’t care much about the other side of the looking glass. They have a world full of energy and barely no Blessed to use it, and even the ones who should be able to are too weak to do anything else but whine. Let them rot if they’re suffering, I won’t change my plans for their sake.”

Zhang Yixing pursed his lips. He wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t like Chanyeol minded. The Blessed Order always spoke a lot, but they never helped. Kyungsoo was one of them, and he was just another traitor. “I think you don’t understand the gravity of this problem. If the balance is seriously affected, both worlds will be in danger. I, representing the Blessed Order, have come here to tell you to stop this madness before it is too late.”

That’s what each one of them wanted. For him to stop. Every arrogant, ignorant soul. “And what happens if I don’t want to?” he asked.

“Then, you will be stopped by force.”

Ah, so it came down to that. The Blessed Order, holy inquisition of Insomnia, whose members always chose to impose, to command.

Chanyeol wouldn’t be commanded.

“Oh, I tell you now that I don’t plan on stopping,” he said, chuckling. Zhang Yixing looked so uncomfortable, like he was about to tell him off again. Chanyeol decided that he couldn’t stand him, nor the people he represented. He needed to teach them a lesson, something severe enough, so they wouldn’t come back. Something special. “But well, now that you have come so far, why don’t you deliver them a message? Something simple enough for them to understand. Will you do that?”

“That is not the reason I have come here for. Mr. Park—”

“Tell me, messenger man, are you left or right handed?”

Yixing blinked at him from his seat before Chanyeol’s desk. “Right handed, but—”

“So the right one it is,” the boy said, raising the noise up until Zhang Yixing’s mind was his to control. The thing that had always marveled him about Soul Magic was how easy it was to use, how naturally it came to him when he called it. “Listen to me, will you? I want you to go back to your Blessed bastards and tell them that I’m not giving in. I am not the scared boy they knew, I am stronger now, the most powerful wizard in the world. I am not Park Chanyeol anymore, you see? I’ve chosen a new name for myself, and you’ll tell them to remember. I am Lord Haze now, I am the Exalted of Insomnia, and I am going to reshape the world.”

“Insomnia will not allow it,” Zhang Yixing said, because of course he couldn’t move but he was still using his capacity to speak. Chanyeol was partially amused, but there were still things he needed to prove.

“I don’t care what Insomnia allows. It’s not like you can stop me. If you wrong me, I’ll get you all, one by one, and I’ll make you want to destroy each other.”

“You wouldn’t,” Yixing replied. “You’re not powerful enough for that.”

“Do you want to try? Because that was part of the plan.” With a sigh, he took his favorite knife from his sheath in his belt and placed it between Yixing and himself on the desk. “Tell me, mister messenger, do you feel like chopping your right hand off?”

The man’s face turned white. “With a knife? His Exalted Majesty, with all due respect…”

“Am I the ‘Exalted Majesty’ now?” Chanyeol turned the noise up, dived deep into Zhang Yixing’s mind and reshaped, changed, built feelings anew. Fabricating desire was simple, human nature was designed to want, even if whatever it was they craved for wasn’t good for them.

The knife still rested on the desk. Zhang Yixing was smiling when Chanyeol - Haze - looked at him again.

“So what now, mister messenger? Do you want to chop your right hand off?” he asked, his voice so sweet.

Zhang Yixing nodded, eager as a child, and grabbed the knife.

—

Baekhyun came across the mirror when Haze was seventeen.

No one visited anymore, not by their own will, but Haze had been alone in the drawing room of his mansion when the surface of the mirror undulated and a black haired boy fell from the glass to the floor with a muffled ‘ouch.’ Haze walked towards him as he stood, reading the noise in his mind for any sign of defiance. Surprisingly, he found none.

“You are a member of the Blessed Order,” he said.

“Ah, well, I guess I am, just because every wizard in this city is. Unless they throw you out, like they did to you.”

Haze blinked down at the boy, genuinely surprised. He was a good-looking kid, with the kind of boyish, mischievous charm that one would have never expected to find among the high-and-mighty Blessed of Insomnia. He was shorter than him, but he carried himself with confidence and stared at him in the face, his expression curious and open.

“Can I ask to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“Ah?”

“Why are you here?”

“Oh, I was tired of the Blessed Order members ordering me around and telling me I should do this and that for the good of Insomnia, so I thought, why not ditch them and come to see the one person they hate? Maybe you’d be more interesting. And this way, perhaps they’ll surrender and throw me out from their little troupe as well.”

Haze stared up at the still-undulating mirror behind the stranger. “You’re a Mirror Traveler,” he realized.

“In the flesh and blood. Byun Baekhyun at your service, Traveler between worlds, shadow bender extraordinaire and former errand boy and slave of the Blessed Order.”

“I was taught that Mirror Travelers were rare,” Haze observed.

“Just you and me in this generation, yes. And that’s kind of the reason I ran away to the only place where they can’t force me back. The ‘greater good for Insomnia’ has turned my life up until now into a nightmare, so I thought it was time for a change.”

Haze wasn’t used to that - the lack of fear, the genuine interest, eyes searching his instead of avoiding his gaze. So he allowed himself to ask. “And what are you doing here? A bad host is the last thing I want to be when hardly no one comes to visit, but I’m forced to remind you that I haven’t invited you.”

The boy, Baekhyun, literally beamed at him, and Haze forgot to breathe for a second.

“Ah, about that. I’m sick and tired of everyone else, and I assumed you would understand the feeling so I told to myself, ‘why don’t I send everything to the starless pits of hell and ask him to take me in’? I heard about your plans from the other wizards and I can’t say I disagree - a world without suffering sounds much better than the hellhole of a city we have now, with that martial law of your mother’s.”

For once in his life, Haze was rendered speechless.

“So well,” Baekhyun asked. “What do you say?”

For once in his life, pain was not what he felt.

For once in his life, someone was running to him instead of running away.

Baekhyun was so lovely. There was something about him, in the way he moved and the way he laughed, in how he was powerful and fearless and he always knew what to do and what to say to make him feel better.

He loved to talk, and loved to listen, and saw the world as that place with many shades of grey and where everything was possible.

He used to laugh when Haze told him that he had never had a desire to visit the world at the other side of the looking glass, or that he didn’t care about the balance the Blessed strived to protect.

“Ah, it’s an interesting place to visit, that’s for sure. Did you know they have their own technology to substitute their lack of magic skill? Like our magitec but different. And did someone tell you that the language in the city at the other side of the Insomnian mirrors sounds like our common tongue and it’s written the same? Those are things the bond between worlds has done - unity, balance. Equilibrium.”

“Why do you sound like one of them?” Haze replied, laughing.

“Because I’ve been educated by them,” Baekhyun had stated with a cheeky grin. “The thing is, the concept was amazing and interesting, indeed, but I wasn’t allowed to wander around the other side for long, when the Order requested me to Travel. ‘Visit the other side and come back in an hour, Byun.’ They don’t understand what a strain on the body it is to cross the looking glass and still they ordered and ordered and never gave me a break. How was I supposed to enjoy my trips, then?”

“Knowing the Blessed, you probably weren’t supposed to.”

“And that’s why I ditched them, yes. What a disappointment, those people. Treat your powerful mages well and they won’t riot against you, that’s what I always said.”

There was something so lovely about Baekhyun, yes, so full of energy and warmth, and Haze was so young, and it was strange to have someone who smiled at him so fondly, so every time it happened he couldn’t look away.

He was the only living Soul Mage, the Exalted of Insomnia, the most powerful living wizard in the world; he could break a man’s will without blinking an eye, and still he kept his powers away from Baekhyun’s mind because he wanted the boy at his side to smile at him like that because he wanted.

Baekhyun, his voice of reason, who told him to stop wasting his own strength in trying to change people and to focus on his own training instead. Baekhyun, who was a powerful Blessed himself - a bender of shadow, who treated darkness as something both terrible and precious, a weapon and a shield and a source.

The boy who had partly made him forget why he had started that quest.

The boy who had been as scared of the concept of ‘them’ as he was. The good kind of scared, for once.

“You… You haven’t done anything to my mind, right?” he asked him that night he had dreaded, the night he had hopelessly waited that would come. They had been training in the gardens of his South District mansion, near the lake, and they haven’t even stopped when it had started to rain.

Rain was troublesome sometimes - it weakened Haze’s miasma walls, dissolved his black fog and made it harder to control - but it was soothing too, in a way. The coolness of water on his skin made him feel vulnerable in a way, like he was a normal boy, a regular human and not someone burdened by the weight of being a hero.

“What do you mean?”

“I just… You.” They have been training their hardest, and their pretended fight had drawn them close, Baekhyun’s shadows keeping Haze in place, and Haze pressing the silver edge of a dagger over the pulse on Baekhyun’s neck. They were strong enough to kill each other, deadly dancers froze in the final step of a waltz, but their posture, their proximity, the way Baekhyun was looking at him was intimate, almost forbidden. Haze had not counted on that. He had not expected to be willing to do so much to be recognized as worthy by someone. “I shouldn’t be thinking the things I’m thinking. Chanyeol, I—”

Baekhyun was the only one who still called him by that name. It caused the good kind of pain.

“I would never let the miasma touch you. I would never control you. You know that, don’t you? You’re the only thing that’s right in this world.”

Haze’s blade bit into his neck, not deep enough to draw blood, as Baekhyun trembled. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. I just came here because— I never expected this to happen to me, but I—”

“But you…?”

The blade fell to the soaked ground, the shadows faded. Haze drew in a breath as Baekhyun cupped his cheek.

“Stars forgive me,” he whispered, “but I want to be happy too.”

And he pulled him down, and then he was kissing him, hopelessly, desperately, open mouthed and warm when everything else was so cold.

And the world was suddenly beautiful, beautiful, a shining light in the dark universe.

He didn’t know how it had happened, but he was so, so happy.

—

He felt truly blessed those months, between whispered words and hands on skin.

Baekhyun sat with him through the day, helping him create a plan for the world to finally shine brighter. He sneaked into his room at night, a flutter of smiles and sighs and promises. Haze told him everything, he bared every single detail of who he was and who he wanted to be - he spoke about his father’s hero tales and Baekhyun laughed and kissed him.

“So,” Baekhyun said once. “The all-great Exalted of Insomnia also has weaknesses, then? I cannot believe.”

“Everyone has them,” Haze replied. Not being affected by Soul Magic could be named as one, of course, but Haze’s great weakness was Baekhyun.

He wondered if he knew.

But of course he knew.

The world was such a beautiful place.

Until Haze blinked and the illusion cracked, and the crystal shards of that happiness finally made the mirage come down.

It had all been a farce. A trick of the Blessed. It was always the Blessed, always that balance they cared so fucking much for.

“You’re with them?! Up until now, you were with them?! I can’t believe this! I cannot believe you!”

Baekhyun was standing in the garden, close to the lake, surrounded by shadows that shielded him. He looked so scared, he looked so sad, but his jaw was set and his tone was firm.

“What you’re doing is wrong! You can’t see it, Chanyeol, but your power is destroying this world and the other!”

“And that was reason enough for you to go the Blessed Order and tell them my secrets?”

Haze had always held his hopes and dreams dear, that was the only part of him that was truly his, the reason behind everything - the world was not good enough as it was, and he was just a boy who had wanted to make it better. No one had ever understood, only one person. Because his mother and his friends were traitors, the members of the Blessed Order were traitors, the Insomnia citizens who had cheered for him as a child had betrayed and locked him in. And Baekhyun had been nice to him, Baekhyun had loved him, and Haze had allowed himself to believe before he had proved himself to be the biggest traitor of them all.

Traitor.

Liar.

Spy.

It hurt so much inside that Haze wanted to die.

“I know there’s a part in you that’s good. I know you get it, deep down. You’re so alone here. Give yourself in, Chanyeol, I can tell them—”

“Don’t call me by that star-forsaken name! That’s not who I am anymore!”

Baekhyun was shielded by a wall of shadows, but that couldn’t protect him from what Chanyeol was. He had never touched Baekhyun’s mind because it was the only thing that was beautiful enough as it is, but that idea was gone. The thing about Soul Magic, for good and for bad, was that claiming control was always too easy.

There were no barriers, no resistance.

Miasma poured out from Haze’s eyes, black streaks sliding down his cheeks.

Breaking Baekhyun was as simple as snapping a twig.

—

The world was dull.

The world was grey.

The world was imperfect.

The world was such an ugly place.

It needed to change.

He had to reshape it.

He would reshape it.

Everything had been taken away from him, so he would take what he wanted from everyone else.

And he would make it all better.

Better.

—

Haze had already tried something like that before, back when he was young and inexperienced and way too innocent, so he knew what to do. It has been his most catastrophic failure, so he also knew what to avoid. Once upon a time, his biggest mistake had been settling for opening only a window, becoming only a messenger and leaving the task to avoid the death of his loved ones to a weak, useless version of himself. But he hadn’t been born to be a witness; he was created to seize.

He knew, when he crossed the mirror that night, that what he was about to do would send the balance between worlds to the depths of the star-blasted hell, but the bond between the worlds had done nothing but hurt him and it was about time he got something back.

The looking glass took him to a small, dim room, and under the light of a single lamp was the familiar form of a boy, curled on a tiny bed. His hair was ash-brown instead of black and his skin wasn’t as pale, but he could recognize the curve of his nose and the shape of his mouth. It was him but not him: he was a shadow, a doppelgänger, a latent Mirror Traveler - another Baekhyun.

The boy looked exhausted but he wasn’t sleeping. He got up, slowly, until he was sitting on the bed, and stared blankly at him. “Who are you?” he asked.

Baekhyun’s mind had always been sacred ground, but even if that boy had the same voice, he felt like a different person, and so Haze reached in. He could hear it all in him - the anger, the apathy, the frustration - so he turned the noise louder, softened the edges in that boy’s soul before his distrust settled in.

“I am the prince of another world,” he told him. “And I’ve come to tell you that you are about to die.”

“Is it you who is going to kill me?”

The boy sounded almost angry, a bit rebellious even under the first layers of his control, and Haze pulled the strings. He didn’t want a mindless puppet; what he was looking for was something more subtle, a small change in the appropriate thoughts and the rebuilding of certain attitudes for an altered version of free will. His Baekhyun had been almost perfect, but the design of his mind needed a little push in the right direction to be optimized.

He had constantly lost to betrayal and death but he was more powerful now. Stainless, a god in white.

He’d make the world beautiful again.

“I am not here to kill you,” he said. “I’ve come to save you. To take you away to a better place. You can stay here and die - that’s inevitable - or you can join me in the city I come from and forget any trace of pain.”

The boy huffed, his essence shining out between the cracks of Haze’s control. “Don’t promise things that you can’t keep.”

Haze smiled. “Want to make a bet?”

The balance was disrupted, and so the miasma came. Black smoke, covering the whole South District in thick fog, tainting the Veil river, oozing from the ground once the sun set. It made people happy by day and it broke them by night, making them dance and scream and lose their minds. It brought them all under Haze’s control, and that was good. He should have been satisfied, and he was.

His only complaint was that his control wasn’t perfect yet, and that Baekhyun was not his Baekhyun. Even despite everything.

He had come with him and stood proudly at his side when he had taken his revenge against the Blessed Order. He had protected Haze with his life during each and every one of the army attacks. He had accepted Insomnia and his new world and cherished them, and he had embraced him, loved him fiercely - begged him to touch him more and to kiss him harder.

And he could pull his strings all he wanted - his mind was open and control was easy after all - but there were thought that simply wouldn’t fall into place.

His Baekhyun had been careless, that one cared too much.

His Baekhyun hated responsibilities, that one carried his close to his heart.

His Baekhyun loathed Insomnia, deep down, and that one was learning to love it.

His Baekhyun was the most powerful bender of shadow, and the element that one controlled was light.

Haze could rewrite and rewire, but that light keep shining through the cracks. It happened once when Baekhyun freed a platoon of captured soldiers, again when he started to talk with Sehun behind his back.

That person had Baekhyun’s face, and Baekhyun’s eyes, but kissing him was like kissing a stranger.

He wanted to keep him. He wanted to destroy him. He wanted to shape him. He didn’t want him to be there, but he wouldn’t allow him to die.

So he rewrote.

He rewired.

He kept the boy in his hold, an altered free will.

But solitude and vision came hand in hand, and if he had learned something, it was that everyone left. He had lost a father, a sister, a mother; he’d given up his people, his allegiance and his lover in exchange of a new world, so he wasn’t surprised when Baekhyun’s replacement betrayed him as well.

He was one of the forces who orchestrated The Purge.

He sold him to the Blessed Order and to the Marshall’s force while he gave him the traitor’s kiss.

He tried to kill him, even when he knew he couldn’t win.

And of course, Haze tried to kill him back.

He hated them all.

He would destroy all of them and create them anew.

Disturbances in the balance gave him strength. The energy he needed.

He would create a new world.

Like a hero.

Like a god.

None of them would have a place in his city with no pain.

Baekhyun’s reflection was unworthy.

His own reflection was the unworthiest of all, as he stood in front of him, in him, peeking into his mind.

“What are you doing here? You’re not allowed.”

He didn’t want him in his head.

He didn’t want him watching.

“I didn’t let you in.”

He was the one in control.

He was the ruler of that town.

Insomnia, the city that never slept.

“Get out.”

His face hurt.

It was cracking.

His reflection was crying tears of black and white.

He was done.

No more games, he would play no more.

“GET OUT!”

The broken white room fell into pieces.

Chanyeol was coughing clots of solid miasma.

The room was spinning around him as he spasmed on the floor, trying to get the substance out. It was everywhere inside him and he was vomiting it and crying it out, and it burned his eyes and tasted bitter as bile. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t breathe. The only thing he was able to do was trying to get a hold in the ground of the inner sanctum as his universe came in and out of focus.

The mirror was broken. He hadn’t seen it but he knew it with an absolute kind of certainty. It has been done and he had made it, even though he didn’t know if he was dreaming still, if he had survived or if Haze would kill him for what he had done.

He couldn’t stay in that place. He needed out.

Another coughing fit folded him in half on the ground, burning his insides like his veins were made of liquid flame. His hand came out black when he brought it to his mouth, but at least he could move it. Move himself. The pain had receded, so he forced himself to crawl, away from the mirror and towards the silver blur of the exit door. His hands and forearms hurt, tiny red needles where they touched the ground, but he didn’t care.

He couldn’t stay there. He wanted to go. He didn’t want to die.

The door was far, so far, but he finally reached it, leaning onto it to stand. Oh god, it hurt, his pain and Haze’s pain, but at least he could do it. His body responded, his legs supported him. The steel of the gates was so cold under his bare hands.

“Please…” he managed to mutter. “Let me out.”

Someone was screaming at the other side, he believed. Every sound was muffled - all music and noise - as he was hearing everything through a wall of water. His breath and the beat of his heart were the only things loud and clear in his ears. Even the door opened in silence.

The door always opened in silence.

He couldn’t stand without the safety of a surface to support him, and so his knees gave in as he stepped forward. It wasn’t important: he was out. The inner sanctum and its broken mirror were behind him and someone was dragging him outside. To safe ground. Safe.

He blinked, tried to focus his vision. He saw ash-brown, and healthy skin, and something black.

“Chanyeol?” a voice asked.

A voice he knew. That he cared for. That was right - Baekhyun. The memory of Haze’s voice came crashing in, loud and bitter. Rewrite and rewire, rewrite and rewire, rewrite and rewire.

“Chanyeol, are you okay? What did Haze do to you? What should I—?”

I am so fucking glad he didn’t manage to break you.

Baekhyun’s face came into focus, wide eyed and pale. Chanyeol parted his lips to tell him that he shouldn’t worry, but only a whimper came out. He needed to speak, he was so happy to see him, despite his own and Haze’s pain still scorching their way through his system. He had wanted to see him one more time, the real Baekhyun - not a ghost or an illusion or the reflection Haze had loved.

Just him. That one.

“He’s tainted,” someone was saying, their voice harsh. Chanyeol was not. He knew he wasn’t. He had survived the corruption in his head and Haze’s voice was silent.

“The door let him through, didn’t it?” another voice snapped back. Baekhyun. He was saying something else, but he couldn’t quite catch it. Then he was looking at him again. “Don’t worry, okay? You’ll be fine. I won’t let him touch you.”

“I-I want—” he muttered. Words were coming to him at least, but his tone was heavy and his throat too raw. There were many things he wanted to say, but his mind was clouded in white fog and the remnants of red-hot pain. He only… “Take me… home. I want to— go home. Please don’t leave me alo— ne.”

Baekhyun’s face came close. “I wouldn’t, I—”

Chanyeol didn’t know what came after that, because the world was too blurry, and he felt too tired, and everything came out of focus as he surrendered to silent calm.

—

The world was a blur of black and white.

He was in a bed of cushions, stone and tapestries all over his head. Kyungsoo was speaking, low and angry, huffing at Baekhyun and Sehun before he strode away.

“You’re unwelcome here,” he said. Chanyeol thought it was unfair.

He fell asleep. He woke up to water on his lips and Baekhyun’s fingers on his forehead, brushing his sweaty hair away from his skin.

Everything blurred out, blurred in. Sehun was coming to say goodbye and then he was gone. Baekhyun was sitting at his side reading a book. Kyungsoo came to scowl and left. He was alone. Baekhyun was back, beside him once more. Minutes bled into hours and day passed in a long, breathless second.

And when he thought he wouldn’t come back, the fever broke and the world finally stopped spinning.

—

Baekhyun was sleeping with his back against the wall and an open book on his lap when Chanyeol opened his eyes.

Every limb hurt, like the ache after a burn, and yet he wasn’t feeling as weak as he thought he’d be. He could move if he tried, first his fingers and then his arms, and his whole body after that. He turned around on the uncomfortable bed of cushions under his back to stare at Baekhyun, but when he managed to accommodate himself in his new position the other boy’s eyes had already opened.

“Chanyeol,” he whispered, and there was that something in his tone.

“Hey, hi.”

“You’re okay,” Baekhyun said, voice hoarse, words fast. He closed the book and rushed to kneel at his side, right hand disheveling his always-perfect hair as he stared down at him.

He looked so, so familiar, and at the same time so uncharacteristically worried about him that Chanyeol almost bursted out laughing. “God, I’ve missed you so much!”

“You? Missed me? Oh my god, Chanyeol, I was not the one who disappeared into the mirror room in the middle of the night and came out hours later, half unconscious and spitting half-coagulated miasma like you were bleeding out!” Baekhyun blinked rapidly, looking upset as hell.

“Ah, so you’re getting angry at me for breaking the mirror now?” Chanyeol joked, voice soft.

“You looked like you were dying! And before you walked out from the sanctum you were screaming like someone was killing you, and I was just outside and I couldn’t get in! I don’t give a damn about that mirror!”

“But you should. Isn’t it the reason we’ve come here? To destroy it?”

“Yeah, but not at the cost of—!”

“Of what? My life?” Chanyeol gave him a faint smile. “Wasn’t that the cost when you brought me here? What’s different now?”

Baekhyun shook his head, biting his lip. “Shit,” he said. “Chanyeol, I—”

Haze's vision was still clear in his head. The first one of all, where his mother had been sane and Baekhyun had been in his room, waking him up, so happy. He wanted Baekhyun to be happy. "You know, Haze tried to control me. To break my mind, I suppose, not with Soul Magic but with the bond that ties us. He trapped me in my own head and showed me things, and I was so lost at some point but still I wanted to see you.”

Baekhyun’s remains of composure started to break, in that way where a thousand expressions seemed to swirl under his skin like he couldn’t allow himself to show whichever one was real. He clenched his fists and made a move to stand up. “I should—”

Chanyeol was faster than that. His strength was coming back, dripping in second after second, and so he reached out and grabbed the other boy by the wrist before he could get out of his reach. His fingers closed around warm skin and Baekhyun fell almost on top of him with a muffled shout.

He looked surprised, his dark, right eye wide open. He looked scared, in a sense, as scared as Chanyeol had felt a second ago. He didn’t look pained, not even a little bit.

Chanyeol wasn’t even angry. “I don’t hurt you anymore. If I touch you.”

Baekhyun stared down at him. “No.”

“Then tell me something. A truth. You say you have a duty. You say there are things you must do. But is that what you want?” He got not reply, so he smiled up. “What would you do, if you could choose what you really wanted to?”

Baekhyun dragged in a long, shaky breath. Then he bent down and kissed him.

It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t soft. It felt like a dam breaking open in the middle of a rainstorm - like water pouring out, tearing the world beyond into pieces. Baekhyun was literally on him, thighs at both sides of his waist, one hand gripping the point between Chanyeol’s neck and shoulder so hard that he probably would be drawing blood soon, and lips parted and soft and slick with spit, demanding access. He was kissing him like the world was ending. He was kissing him like he was dying, and Chanyeol had seen that in his dreams and in his nightmares, he had had the noise and the song, but right then the world was silent and Baekhyun was the only thing he could hear.

Baekhyun bit his bottom lip, and whimpered when Chanyeol let out a choked sound. He turned his mouth to his jaw, the soft skin below and then his neck, biting like someone who wants to mark as Chanyeol’s hands found purchase into his hair, avoiding the strings that kept the eyepatch in place and digging into locks of soft brown, fisting them, disheveling, breaking that image of perfect properness that Baekhyun had always kept.

When he turned them around, pressing his wrists against the bed of cushions, the boy offered no resistance. He looked breathless, clothes rumpled, cheeks flushed and right eye blown. He downright keened at the loss of contact, arching his back to get close.

“Fuck me,” he breathed out. “Fuck me.” He grabbed Chanyeol by the wrist when he moved it to the button at the collar of his shirt. “Leave that on. No time for taking it off. Just hurry. I want it so much. To feel you.”

Baekhyun had to know, the kind of effect he had in him. He knew how to read people and what to say, but he sometimes forgot that Chanyeol was learning to read him, too.

He kissed him once more, because he could afford that. There were more things that he had seen, secrets buried deep in Haze’s mind. He had forgotten about them because he didn't want to remember. But once again, he had to. Reality was what it was.

“You're a Traveller, aren't you? Just like I am; not from Insomnia but from the other world.”

Under him, Baekhyun’s body became tense and hard. He released him, moved away so he could sit.

“What? How do you—? It was Haze, right?”

“It was, but not by choice. If you want to know what happened exactly, he tried to get into my mind but it was me who got into his. He casted me out and now I can’t feel him.”

“But you saw things.”

“I did.”

The urgency between them was gone, momentum decreasing into a slowing impulse, Baekhyun’s voice a whisper and Chanyeol’s trembling. Even though he wanted him. Even if.

“I see.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” When Chanyeol had arrived at Insomnia, Baekhyun had told him that he would make him work at ‘storytelling.’ And that was why Baekhyun did, story after story and tale after tale. He was more than aware of the fact that he had no right to be angry. He knew Baekhyun kept secrets, he had accepted and said that he didn’t mind. And he wasn’t angry, not exactly, not with him - not completely at him - but he still felt like someone had punched him in the guts. “I was so lost when I came, I thought I was the only one. Why wouldn’t you?”

“I didn’t want to,” replied Baekhyun, tone sharp. His own face fell when he registered what he had just said - when he watched Chanyeol react to it. “No, that’s not it, not exactly. What I meant… I told you that there were some things I was keeping, and I didn’t want to tell them to you because I… this. This is about me, not about you.”

“Yeah, this is about you feeling like shit about yourself! And, I don’t know, I care about you, so you could sit with me and let it all out instead of asking me to fuck you. That’s not gonna make you feel better, if that’s what you want.”

Baekhyun looked like he was going to be sick. “What? No, no, no, I wasn’t using you. Don’t think that I’d use you, not for that, I’d never—”

“This is not about me, but you drag me in. I have feelings for you, but you want to have sex with me without me looking at whatever it is you hide under your shirt. Maybe I have no right to ask, but how do you think it feels?”

Baekhyun clutched his shirt as he stood up. He was livid. He was going to run away, and Chanyeol knew.

Rewrite and rewire. He wondered how deep Haze had dug.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Are you sick? Haze toyed with you for years. Did you catch Euphoria?”

“My reflection got Euphoria, not me,” Baekhyun replied, voice shaking. “I met him once. Haze broke his mind into pieces and he still was the stronger one.”

He turned around towards the curtains that would lead him out while Chanyeol struggled to stand. His powers weren’t stable enough yet for him to clearly hear his music, but he didn’t need Soul Magic to know Baekhyun wanted to be alone. And him as well. He wanted to follow, but he didn’t feel like looking at him in the eye. Not now.

“Hey,” he said, and Baekhyun turned back, bottom lip trapped between his teeth again. “I saw in Haze’s mind that he labeled you a traitor because you were one of the people who helped plan The Purge.”

“Yeah. I destroyed the mirrors in his mansion, and stole the one he kept in his drawing room. I collaborated with the marshall’s forces, and the Blessed Order, and with the people who lived in the Insomnia Metro tunnels, like Jongdae, and we tried to limit his powers. Break every looking glass before Haze could avoid it. Limit his power as much as we could. Make him withdraw to his mansion for as long as possible, so we could find a way to stop him while he powered back up.”

“Sounds risky.”

“It was. And still it was my idea. Haze had become careless about me so I used my chance.”

“But then I don’t understand.” Chanyeol licked his lips. “You planned all that, but still the marshall, the Blessed Order and even Colonel Suho and Jongdae despise you like you did something terrible to them.”

Baekhyun let out a hollow laugh, a twist of his usual, lively persona. “Ah, but that’s because I did, don’t you see? It was my duty to aid the Blessed Order because I helped Haze massacre them. I needed to help control Euphoria Syndrome because it turned into an epidemic when my arrival sent the balance to hell. All of this are amends for the things I’ve destroyed. And they know.”

Rewrite and rewire. Everyone knew that it was what Haze did.

Chanyeol huffed. “They don’t deserve you,” he whispered. “My mother, Jongdae, Colonel Suho, the guys in the Blessed Order. None of them. They have never deserved you.”

Grabbing the curtain with trembling fingers, Baekhyun rushed out, and finally left alone, Chanyeol fell into his uncomfortable cushion bed and cried himself to sleep.

Eleventh Act - Pie Jesu
Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.
Dona eis requiem sempiternam.

The city was calm when they went back up to the surface.

“Too calm,” Sehun told them, when they dropped by Jongdae’s store to leave Chanyeol’s guitar. “People were nervous in the streets when all those patrols were looking for you two, but now everyone seems to be… fine with everything. Not even the soldiers look motivated.”

“Well, that’s good for us,” Baekhyun said, shrugging. He had left his belongings in one of the corners of the train car, shiny cane on top.

“Do you really have to go up there?”

“Yeah, we do. We’ll be fine, Sehunnie. Don’t worry about us, we’re strong and we’re only going to pay Yixing a visit. We’ll be back before the curfew tonight, or in the morning tomorrow.”

“Why do you even need to go?”

Baekhyun barely looked at Chanyeol, even though he was the one who spoke that time. “I can’t hear Haze’s voice anymore, not since he tried to control me and failed. I need to ask Yixing about that.”

“Maybe the Exalted is just recharging his powers?” Sehun asked. He didn’t look particularly convinced about the soundness of his own theory, but Chanyeol shook his head no anyway. Haze’s voice had been with him even before he came to Insomnia, a constant whisper at the back of his mind that had been growing louder and louder and Chanyeol shattered the mirrors that made their shared strength shift, and now suddenly the voice was gone. It wasn’t muted, it hadn’t faded - it had been simply weeded out his mind like it had never existed. Chanyeol had expected the steady feeling of a ghost limb but he had gotten a clear, surgical cut and a cauterized wound instead.

The whole sensation was so strange.

Jongdae was supposed to return from his duty in the city about an hour later, but they couldn’t stop to wait for him if they wanted to be back within the day. Bidding Sehun goodbye, they crossed the abandoned metro tunnels towards the surface, blinking when they were faced with the early afternoon sun. Chanyeol didn’t know how many days they had been underground, but he was sure that it had been over a week.

The marshal had been after them when they had left but, surprisingly enough, Sehun was right and the whole city looked as calm as ever, with people rushing down the streets and colorful automobiles on the road. It was Chanyeol who was not the same.

“Oh, fuck,” he muttered, feeling his legs shake and tumbling until he found purchase on the metal railing that surrounded the exterior of the metro stop. Baekhyun hurried to his side, placing a tentative hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

He had been safe underground because the tunnels were mostly abandoned, but the streets of Insomnia were so crowded. There were people everywhere, each with their own sound, all mixing into a dissonant amalgam so loud that it was making Chanyeol dizzy.

“My Soul Magic has been upgraded two times since I was in the open for the last time,” he replied through clenched teeth. “I was kinda counting on this, but still—”

Baekhyun’s hand caressed his back, and Chanyeol tried to tell himself he was shivering because of his incipient headache. “Can you keep going?”

“No way but to go on anyway, huh?”

The hand in his back was gone, and Baekhyun was uncharacteristically silent during the whole five minutes it took them to reach the closest tram stop. He was not to blame, not exactly - Chanyeol himself was focusing too hard to keep the sound out of his brain, and besides that, he didn’t know what to say.

He could have started a casual conversation about how the soldiers didn’t even look at them twice when they walked just in front of them, or about how lucky they were to find a couple of free seats in the City Center to North District tram. He could even have commented on the weather, and how the terrible summer heat of Insomnia was a little more bearable that day, but he wasn’t sure about how the conversation should progress.

Hey, Baekhyun, I don’t feel like melting under the sun today. Now the weather is almost as uncomfortable as what you could find in the city I come from… which you probably already know because you were born in the same place.

It sounded stupid and terrible, and not at all like something that he could say, but at least it was better than the other option that came to mind. Ah, so you finally kissed me after weeks of having fantasies-slash-dreams about doing it, and I know I rejected you when you suggested we should have sex, but you hurt me by hiding stuff, and maybe I don’t have the right to be, but I still kinda told you I have feelings for you and you ignored it so yeah.

And if option A was horrible and option B was worse, the only thing he could do was to keep going forward with the mission and hope that Baekhyun would open up. At least, he wasn’t pretending to be happy anymore, exhaustion showing up between the cracks of his perfect mask.

“Here,” he told him, signaling for him to get up when they finally arrived to the stop closest to Yixing’s tiny home.

North District had always been less crowded than the center, but the streets around them were uncharacteristically empty. That was good for Chanyeol’s Soul Magic problem, but there was something… unnatural about the quiet, an eerie feeling crawling its way under his skin.

The sensation didn’t totally fade, not when they walked down the street, not when they finally arrived to their destination. Only when they were already sitting at Yixing’s cramped living room that the prickling under his skin receded enough for him to focus again.

“Do you want a cup of tea? Coffee? I have run out of milk again, I’m sorry.” Yixing was asking from the kitchen as Chanyeol and Baekhyun sat on opposite ends of the sofa. That would have served a purpose if said sofa was big enough for them to keep their distance, but it was a two person couch and even then their shoulders were almost touching.

“I, um, I’ll have tea this time,” Chanyeol called, at the same time Baekhyun let out a long sigh.

“Coffee for me,” he requested. Blinking, Chanyeol turned his head to look at him.

“Black coffee? You?”

“Today’s an exception.”

He apparently needed the caffeine, because he gulped the contents of his cup in one go as soon as Yixing placed it on the coffee table before them.

“Do you feel well, Mr. Byun?” Yixing asked, frowning.

“Drop the Mr. Byun thing; it makes me feel old. And same thing about the pleasantries, Yixing. I know you are this really polite guy and I’d really like to indulge you with small talk but we have no time.”

“What is the matter?”

“Remember the mirrors we talked about when all this started? We broke them all. It made Chanyeol stronger as we expected but it also strengthened the bond between him and Haze… until Haze tried to take control of him.”

“Is that so?” Yixing muttered. He wasn’t wearing gloves, artificial hand clearly in sight, and Chanyeol couldn’t help but remember Haze’s overly nice voice, offering Yixing a knife and telling him to chop his own off. He still felt so odd, so strangely nauseous, like he was going to puke.

“We had a mental fight of sorts,” he said, because he thought he’d feel better if he spoke. “He caught me by surprise but I think I won. And the thing is that I haven’t sensed Haze in my head since then. Not a trace.”

“And he is alive.”

“He has to be. He was alive and strong the last time I felt him in me.”

“Everything in our two worlds is linked,” Baekhyun added. “But I think Chanyeol somehow snapped the bond between Haze and himself. Maybe it was Haze’s fault in a sense, because he pulled from that link so much that he snapped the cord of magic bonding them but… Whatever the truth is, Haze’s voice is gone from his head, and the rest of the magic is probably gone from his system. Haze’s shield as well, possibly.”

Baekhyun had said it so casually, and despite himself Chanyeol felt his gut churn in something really close to pain. He had thought— Haze’s shield only burned the ones who wanted to hurt him in any way, and it hadn’t activated when Baekhyun had kissed him, but then—

“Can we check?” he asked. “Can you try to cut me or something?”

“I could fetch a knife and try, for research purposes. What you imply is… interesting.”

Yixing was gone and back in a second, carrying a big kitchen knife in his metal hand. He signaled towards Chanyeol’s forearm with the tip of the thing, but Baekhyun grabbed him by the wrist before he could say anything else.

“Let me,” he whispered.

“It is fair. Go on.”

Baekhyun’s pulse was steady as he grabbed the kitchen knife, but he never looked Chanyeol in the eye as the other boy unbuttoned and rolled up his sleeve up to the elbow. There was a feeling of nakedness, a strange vulnerability as Chanyeol offered the inner side of his arm and Baekhyun bit his lip as he moved to press the blade into the soft skin.

For a moment, Chanyeol thought it would work. He could feel the coldness of the knife on him for the fraction of a second - but then there was a flash and the blade flew away from Baekhyun’s hand as the boy stifled a gasp, sinking into the door frame with a crack.

“Stars!” hissed Baekhyun as Yixing turned towards the door, all calm.

“Oh, at least the blade did not melt,” he commented, as if that was some kind of achievement. “That is the only kitchen knife I own.”

“I— what happened? Is the shield operative, then?”

“If you are certain that his presence in your mind is truly gone but the remnants of his magic are still within you, I am inclined to think that perhaps Baekhyun is right and you broke the bond… but you did it only partially. To put it simply, let us say you snapped the part of that link that depends strictly on you and the Exalted. We are all connected by our reflections by both mind and magic. You brain is one thing, but then there is the spell. Ancient wizardry, centuries old, the one trick that allowed the Blessed to keep practicing their arts in Insomnia even though magic was dying.”

“The mirror spell,” muttered Baekhyun, nodding. “The one that unites our two worlds.”

“The ancient Blessed were artists in their craft. It is a pity that their work is not really appreciated. They did much more than linking two worlds together: they used looking glasses as catalysts to turn two unbound realities into mirror images. Cultural differences remain even today, of course, but our naming conventions, our language, even our physical appearances evolved to match. Even Blessed were born in your side of the mirror, despite magic users not traditionally existing in your world. It is quite the interesting process, something I have always been eager to study.”

Yixing had been looking at them both when he mentioned the other world. Chanyeol tried not to feel very betrayed and forced both Baekhyun’s and Yixing’s songs out of his head. He was feeling more and more nauseous by the second.

“So Chanyeol can’t totally separate himself from Haze? Is that what you mean?”

“Not as long as there are mirrors in one piece, if my theories are correct. The marshal, the Blessed Order, even the magitec department… They didn’t only keep those mirrors because they were unable to destroy them. They did because it is deeply rooted in the collective mind of this world that mirrors are an important matter. They are a portal for most of the energy the Blessed have been using for centuries and the origin of Soul Magic as we know it. And without them, obviously, Mirror Travelers would not exist.”

“So if all the mirrors were broken, that second link would snap, right? Does that mean that we would be able to break the bond between worlds?”

There was a long second of silence. “Is that what you are aiming for?” Yixing asked, tone soft.

“I think it is what needs to be done,” Baekhyun replied immediately, voice slightly shaking. “So can we?”

Chanyeol blinked, trying to keep his focus on Baekhyun’s profile. “Wait, we have been breaking mirrors. We dealt with all of them already.”

“Not all. There’s another one.”

“What?”

“The one Haze has been using to get to us every time we broke the other mirrors. He came from somewhere, right? He has one left, that’s why he’s still strong enough.”

“Strong enough?” Chanyeol repeated. He still had that strange knot in his throat, growing wider and wider by the second. “I have felt myself getting stronger, and Haze himself mentioned that his power comes from whole mirrors while mine grows on the act of breaking them, but besides the cracks on his face every time we splinter one of those glasses… Have you really seen him weaken? He doesn’t act weak to me.”

“But you defeated him.”

“I caught him by surprise, Baekhyun. And maybe it happened because I was stronger than him for an instant, not because he’s lost power.”

“Chanyeol…”

“Let’s be honest here: for having only one mirror left he acted as overconfident as ever. I was in his mind, inside of it, and his whole… being is fractured, which means he’s mad as fuck. And he was in great pain but didn’t look desperate to me. He was angry, but didn’t act like a man about to die.”

Baekhyun narrowed his eyes. “Pain?”

That’s the only comment you’re going to make about my whole damn speech?

“Ah, well, but theoretically breaking the mirrors should weaken him,” stated Yixing, before Chanyeol could add anything else. “Think of them as doors of sorts. Keeping them open makes the Exalted powerful because they allow the energy to cross from its source to him.”

“Its source?”

“Your world. That is why breaking those mirrors makes you strong instead: you are not leeching his energy; you are getting it back.”

Chanyeol would have thought all that was very funny, had he been in a different situation. “So much about me being the weaker reflection.”

Baekhyun sighed, shaking his head. “You haven’t replied to me yet, Yixing. Does this all mean that we can break the bond between worlds?”

“The spell was done centuries ago, and if something is done, it can usually be undone. Theoretically speaking, of course.”

“I looked for information about the topic when I was at the headquarters of the Blessed Order, but the books were gone.”

“They were obviously not there,” said Yixing matter-of-factly, “because I acquired them from Do Kyungsoo.” He smiled when Baekhyun stared at him, wide eyed. “Would you want me to fetch them for you? I keep them upstairs.”

“Well, yes?” the boy replied after a short pause. “That would actually be helpful?”

“Ah, I am glad to be of assistance!”

Chanyeol would have sworn there was a spring in Yixing’s step as he left for his personal quarters, leaving them alone in the living room. Baekhyun got up from his corner of the sofa almost instantly, pacing the room until he stopped in front of the kitchen knife that was still stuck in the door frame. He stretched his fingers, as if to grab it, but in the end he left his hand drop.

“So Haze’s shield’s still active, huh?” said Chanyeol. The sensation of oddness that had been accompanying him since they had abandoned the tunnels had receded a little bit, but the room was now filled with a different kind of tension. He knew Baekhyun could feel it too, he could see it in the curve of his shoulders and the line of his mouth.

“It needs to go before we send you back to our world. You won’t be able to cross the mirror with it on.”

It was the first time Baekhyun said it like that. His world. Their world. Chanyeol stood up. “And what are you going to do?”

“Me?”

“When we weaken Haze. When I’m not needed here anymore.” Chanyeol wasn’t really intending to make his voice sound so harsh, but he couldn’t help it. He was just so tired of all that, and Baekhyun’s melody was so loud, and he wanted to be home, but there were many things that he wanted and he couldn’t get them all. “I understand what you want to do by breaking these worlds apart, don’t think I don’t. This is about separating me from Haze completely, isn’t it? So he can be killed and I can leave without dying with him.”

“This is not only about saving you. It’s about saving Insomnia as well. If the bond is broken, magic will be gone from this world, but the Blessed are a dying race and there’s alternatives to magitec. There’s a price to pay, but it’s a necessary evil.”

Baekhyun didn’t move as Chanyeol approached him. He remained still, almost defiant, like he expected the other boy to start hating him too.

“But Baekhyun, what about you?”

There was a flash of surprise, rapidly repressed. “Me?”

“If we break the worlds apart, what will you do? Without Haze’s menace to fight against, will you still belong in this place?”

It took a moment for Baekhyun to finally reply, choosing the words carefully, as if they strung in his throat as he forced them out. “I love Insomnia, you know that, but Insomnia doesn’t love me. I’m their harbinger of doom or something, after all.”

“Do you… hate our side of the mirror?” Chanyeol asked. He remembered the first memory Haze had of that Baekhyun - the boy on the bed who had witnessed a prince of death come out from the mirror and had asked if it was true that he was going to kill him. He had seemed so eager to go back then, and still Baekhyun smiled.

“Do I? I was so angry and so sad when I lived there, but now…”

Chanyeol sucked in a breath. “Come with me, then.”

Baekhyun was still staring up at him, face tilted up, lips parted. He tried to take a step back, away from him, but he hadn’t taken into account the wall just behind him. He looked like a cornered animal. “Sorry, what?” he whispered.

He was going to reject him again. So that should be the last time he tried. “It was you who I wanted to see when I thought I was going to die, so I suppose that means I’d miss you?”

Baekhyun’s gaze dropped at his feet. “I’ll fight with you,” he muttered. “We’ll fight Haze together and we’ll win. I won’t hold back.”

“But you won’t come with me.”

He would have slapped himself for being so stupid. Luckily, he didn’t have time to further make a fool of himself, because Yixing walked into the living room through the door in the opposite wall, still looking so satisfied that Chanyeol felt bad for his own sullen mood.

“Here it is, here it is, what you were looking for.”

Baekhyun’s expression changed so suddenly, lips curving up into a grin. “Ah, really? Let me see!” He squeezed Chanyeol’s wrist as he passed beside him, but Chanyeol was barely able to feel the contact when a new wave of oddness hit him, leaving him slightly breathless. He turned around, hair standing on end, as he observed Baekhyun kneel before the coffee table as Yixing sat in the sofa and opened a big, ancient book.

“Careful with this volume, I believe it is one of the most valuable in my collection. But here, the clue you needed is right here in these pages. According to this, our two worlds were linked by connecting their Soulstreams - the flow of souls. That is the reason why each one of us has an exact counterpart on the other side: energy is made to flow from one reflection to the other. And this was achieved with an ancient version of Soul Magic, of course.”

“So that means it can be undone with Soul Magic as well. How do we do that?”

They should have been safe in this place, all of them, but Chanyeol still felt observed, nervous, like something was becoming wronger and wronger by the second. It had been happening all day, but it was worse now. It had receded minutes ago, but now it was back in full force and he didn’t understand why.

“I am not saying it is impossible, Baekhyun, but this was achieved by a large group of people combining their forces. From what I know, Soul Magic was weaker years ago than what it is now, but still one would need a very large quantity of energy to even attempt something at that scale.”

“Would that kill us if we tried?”

“That, I do not know. However…”

Chanyeol turned his head to look out the closest window. The sun was traveling down the sky. It would set in two hours at most. Curfew would ring through the street in one hour and a half.

“We need a mirror for that, right? Haze’s mirror,” Baekhyun was saying.

“I presume so. You need to be careful, however. There is only one mirror left, Baekhyun and it will be needed for Chanyeol to Travel across.”

“So we need to incapacitate Haze before breaking it, huh?”

Chanyeol could see it now - hear it in the threads of the Soul Melody that filled the world. Baekhyun’s song was the louder than ever if he concentrated on it, but in essence it was the old same song (shrilling violins, much less monotonous and much firmer. Resolute). However, Yixing’s was not. It was almost unnoticeable at first, a buzz almost too low for his mind to catch, but it existed. It was in him, it had been in everyone.

That was the oddness he had been looking for. And he had only noticed it then because the noise had turned slightly higher.

Oh-oh.

“Yixing.”

The man raised his head from the book. “Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s your song. There’s—” Chanyeol didn’t have time to say anything else, because the low hum in Yixing’s melody grew into a high pitched shrill and the man simply froze, the obvious concern in his face dissolving into an expressionless mask. Baekhyun stifled a gasp, leaning towards the man at his side to grab him by the shoulders.

“Yixing?” he asked. He turned to Chanyeol when he got no reply, eyes hardening when he saw the boy covering his ears with his hands. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t exactly hear his voice anymore but—”

“Haze.” Pressing his lips in a thin, white line, Baekhyun shook Yixing by the shoulders. “Snap out of it, you hear me? Don’t let him get to you.”

It wasn’t the first time that Haze had controlled Yixing, but never in Haze’s memories Chanyeol had seen something like that. “Baekhyun, we have a problem.”

“Don’t you say.” Not letting go of his friend’s shoulders, the boy scanned the room, brow furrowed. “Did Haze follow us? Where the hell is he? He has to be close if he’s controlling Yixing like this.”

Chanyeol swallowed. That odd feeling was growing, growing, growing. “No. The problem, precisely, is that I think he’s not close at all.”

“What? But that’s not—”

Baekhyun’s words died in an exclamation when Yixing moved. He did it suddenly, uncoordinatedly, like a doll hanging from broken strings, hands shaking and wide grin curving his lips up. He looked like the product of one of Haze’s nightmares - the kind of dreams Haze always showed Chanyeol.

“Yixing…” Baekhyun called again, voice all soft, cautious. “Yixing, are you with us?”

“The party,” the other man replied, raising his tone until his voice broke in a high-pitched burst of laughter. “We don’t want to be… late to the party.”

“Blasted stars. Haze, you bastard!”

“Don’t waste your words, he’s not here!” Chanyeol had moved to the window and completely drawn the curtains away. He felt terrible, almost physically sick from all the wrongness in the air. He’d had a bad feeling, and he had hoped it would stay at the back of his mind where it belonged, but his omen had turned into something real. Real and scary. “Baekhyun, look at this.”

The other boy was there even before he had finished speaking, face pale and eyes hard. “He’s doing this, isn’t he? He has stepped up his game somehow.”

“Yeah. And whatever you might believe, he doesn’t seem weakened at all.”

Baekhyun shook his head, speechless, eyes trained on the sight at the other side of Yixing’s window. The street had been strangely empty when they had arrived, but suddenly it was full. Of people, coming out of houses and apartments and cafes. Of puppets under Haze’s command, walking down the avenue, all in the same direction, like dolls on strings, about to break.

“How is he controlling so many?” Baekhyun whispered. His head shot up after that, eyes narrowing as he hissed a curse. “Oh, fuck, Yixing!”

When Chanyeol turned around, the man was almost at the hall. Like all the others, he wanted to get out. To leave, to follow, to submit to Haze’s will. Baekhyun was on him before the could reach the door, tackling him to the floor as he tried to use his own weight to keep him still. Yixing didn’t bother, didn’t complain - only scratched the wooden floor as he emotionlessly struggled to push the man on him away. To keep going.

“Can you do something?” Baekhyun hissed through clenched teeth. “Break his magic!”

“I can’t!”

Chanyeol had tried. His first impulse had been to wrap the full extent of his powers around Yixing’s song to soften it, but he found no music when he reached out. He could still hear it in the background, beneath the buzz, but Yixing was surrounded by a layer of noise so thick that he couldn’t breach it. He felt like he was going to puke anytime soon from the effort and the nausea, even if everything he had had was a single cup of tea. Trying to destroy Haze’s control once he had completely seized a mind was like swimming against a current too strong to keep his own head afloat.

“We can’t miss the party!” Yixing screamed then. “We have to go to the party! We all have been invited!”

He arched his body on the floor, almost managing to get Baekhyun off him. The boy’s head collided against a small table, as packed with books as the rest of the house, slim fingers closing on the wood to find support. He reached up, breathed in.

“Baekhyun!” Chanyeol called.

The boy had grabbed a volume bound in blue leather. He brought it down on the side of Yixing’s face one, two, three times, until the man beneath his body stopped moving. He huffed then, breath slightly shaking. “What party are you talking about? Stay home, you have always been more of a nerdy type.”

Chanyeol kneeled before them. Yixing was probably going to get a very ugly looking lump in his head, but at least he was breathing. “You’re savage sometimes, you know?”

“I would prefer to be called passionate and strong-willed, thank you.”

“Well, Mr. Strong-willed man, what are we going to do with Yixing? Because I assume he’ll turn into a party animal again when he regains consciousness.”

“Ah, that’s easy. He won’t be able to follow if he can’t get out right? So we’re locking him in. Preferably somewhere small and without windows.”

“Like what, a broom closet?”

Baekhyun tilted his head, hair falling on his right eye. “Do you think he has one?” he asked. “I believe he has one. Do you think the door will resist?”

“I wasn’t exactly being serious.”

“Because you’re the cute cinnamon roll in this team. I am the realist war veteran.”

At Baekhyun’s signal, Chanyeol grabbed Yixing’s fallen body by the arms. “You are talking like a millennial,” he commented, as they half-carried, half dragged the unconscious man towards the front door. “It’s kind of weird.”

“Ah, been holding it in for years! But it sometimes slips, you see. It happens to the very best when they let their guard down and all.”

“Seems fair. Where are we taking him?”

Baekhyun lowered the unconscious body in front of the door, pausing for a second before grabbing a long, wooden scarf from a hanger in the corner. “With us,” he said, kneeling to tie Yixing’s hands at his back, fingers fast and nimble as he worked. “By the way, we’re stealing his car.”

“Does this mean you’re driving?”

Baekhyun finished tightening the knots and looked up at him with a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Hey, if nothing else, I’m fast. And fast is precisely what we need to be.”

—

The crowds were moving south.

Controlled people were everywhere, coming out from apartments, stores and cafes. All of them moved with the rigid steps of automatons, all of them laughed out loud and smiled. There weren’t as many in the usually calm North District, but the human mob started to thicken as they approached the center of Insomnia, forcing Baekhyun to slow the car down.

“Oh, shit, shit, shit.”

At least, people were ignoring their presence as they advanced, like they didn’t even see them and that was at the same time scary and relieving. They wouldn’t have been able to win against a full city of enemies, no matter how strong they were, and much less being weaponless, but those people were mindless and heading south for a reason, and Chanyeol wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.

Bad luck for him, because that was exactly what he was going to do. It was his duty as much as Baekhyun’s, no matter how high the price, no matter how loud was the noise in the air or how powerful Haze seemed to be. There was one mirror left, and his reflection needed to be stopped.

He was controlling everyone. Chanyeol wasn’t sure if he had gotten hold of the full city, but if Yixing had been affected, then other people - Kyungsoo, Jongdae, Sehun - could be as well. And that couldn’t be, Haze shouldn’t dare, he couldn’t be so strong.

“Please,” was muttering Baekhyun, all pale, fingers clutching the wheel. “Please. Come on.”

The buildings were growing leaner and taller around them, the Insomnia skyline a picture of black and crimson red all around them. It felt like the whole city was burning, so bright, always bright, that world of magic and wonder, with the quality of those beautiful dreams that always turned into nightmares.

“We’re here! Help me with this!”

Baekhyun turned off the engine with an urgent haste, jumping down from his seat to help Chanyeol carry the unconscious Yixing. They had been in that same street a thousand times, the last of them that afternoon, but the whole landscape looked like a totally different thing with the setting sun bleeding on them and the voices of Haze’s puppets laughing and screaming as they proceeded their way down the avenue.

Chanyeol had never been so grateful for the darkness and the quiet of the old Insomnia metro tunnels and the silence that came with them. At least, until that silence became unnerving, because there was no trace of sound, no music besides his own and Baekhyun’s violin cry.

“Baekhyun, I can’t hear—” he started, panting through the effort of carrying an unconscious body. The boy nodded, gesture abrupt and firm.

“Let’s keep going.”

They descended the steps leading to their usual platform as fast as they could, but even down there was no trace of sound. Baekhyun lowered the body onto the ground as soon the stairs gave way onto solid ground and ran into the train before Chanyeol could even speak.

“Jongdae!” he called. “Sehunnie!”

There’s no one there.

Something between a gasp and a cry came from inside the abandoned train, and Chanyeol left Yixing behind and rushed in. The first thing he realized was that he had been wrong and that there was a person inside of the car, but it didn’t take more than a second to realize that it was only one person - Jongdae, lying unconscious on the metallic floor.

So that’s why he has no music.

“Baekhyun? What happened here?”

The boy shook his head. He was holding his own cane, gripping it so hard his knuckles had turned white. “Someone knocked him unconscious with this,” he said. “Maybe Sehunnie? If Haze’s… spell, or whatever this is affected different people at different intervals, perhaps… Even if it was only minutes apart. Then maybe Jongdae got controlled before and… Haze can’t play with unconscious people, not with this trick. Look at Yixing.”

“But Sehun, then…”

Baekhyun lowered his gaze. “He’s not here. You can’t hear him, right? His song or anything.”

“There’s only your song and mine.” Sehun’s melody had always been that terribly emo tune, so loud and clear, a statement in itself. “Unless he’s unconscious around here, I am afraid that…”

“He’s not here. I know he’s not. And he might be safe elsewhere, but he should be here. He didn’t have plans today, and I— We were supposed to be back by the curfew and he was suppose to be here waiting for us.” Baekhyun clenched his fists, bottom lip trembling. “I’m so done with him. So tired of Haze and his games. What a fucking hero he is, sending this whole city to hell because he wants to remove pain from people, huh? I prefer to hurt than to watch him do this, to you, to Jongdae, to Yixing, to Sehun.”

“To you.”

“To me.” Baekhyun nodded to himself, raising his head then, to look at him. “He wanted to control you and he has failed, so he’s going all out, huh? So much for him and his tricks, because I’m going all out as well. Good for Haze if he wants to have some kind of final fight, because sure as hell I’m not letting him win. He’s loves producing miasma, but I am a bender of light. He’s going down.”

The blood in Baekhyun’s hands glowed as he spoke, bright ramification of veins shimmering beneath the skin. Sehun had warned Chanyeol about that, he had told Baekhyun not to use his powers and brought a lamp so he didn’t have to, but Chanyeol’s weak attempt as a protest died in his throat as soon as he had parted his lips.

He looked at Baekhyun in the face. He listened to his song - a call for war, a scream for help, a prayer - and nodded. “Tell me what you want to do and I’ll follow.”

Baekhyun smirked at him. And he was beautiful, fierce, eyes as dark and hard as Insomnia’s core. “We need to pay the Exalted a visit, exactly as he wants us to, but the streets are too crowded. So tell me one thing, Chanyeol. This metro line goes south, and the subway is abandoned but operative. Do you believe you can help me make this train move?”

—

They had to walk south even after they reached the end of the train line. They had to go to the surface and cross a broad bridge over Veil river, following Haze’s puppets into the only side of the city Chanyeol had never been in.

The first thing the boy heard was the music - not a melody like the ones that painted the world in threads of sound but the chords of a real, instrumental song, the kind of upbeat rhythm that was meant to be danced.

“Is Haze throwing a party?” he whispered.

Baekhyun narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Have that guitar of yours ready to rock.”

Under the bridge, the water of the veil swirled, turbulent, a cloud of black miasma raising from the current. The smog was deeper at the other shore, dark and thick, an entrance to the part of Insomnia that Haze had claimed for himself, and Chanyeol’s skin crawled at the mere idea of approaching it, but he took a deep breath and stayed at Baekhyun’s side as they followed the crowd right inside.

The miasma was cold in his lungs and on his skin, like a thousand of tiny needles were trying to pierce their way beneath. For a moment, he couldn’t see, couldn’t breath, and he forced himself forward by grabbing Baekhyun’s arm and concentrating on placing one foot in front of the other. All around them, the citizens that Haze was dragging towards him stammered and fell, some of them struggling to get up, others blindingly reaching out to find purchase - on the floor, on their boots, anywhere. They had to avoid the slowing and falling bodies, Baekhyun and he, sticking together and moving forward, forward, forward, until Haze’s party song was louder than the buzz of his noise.

Chanyeol thought they would have to go on like that endlessly, but after some minutes his surroundings went from black to dark grey. He had been absolutely blind, just following Baekhyun and the music, but he blinked and saw the blurred shapes of men, women and children advancing towards a point in horizon where darkness seemed less dark and the smoke around them wasn’t as cold.

It’s there, he thought, focusing on his shallow intakes of breath. He was alive, and Baekhyun was warm against him, and they couldn’t be controlled. They were armed, and strong, and ready for a fight. And step after step, they moved on, until the thickest part of the cloud was left behind and they found themselves standing at the edge of a broken world.

Haze had started to take control of the southernmost district of Insomnia when he was barely more than a child. It had been a place for the rich and the noble, but everyone had left after the miasma had started to settle in and, with no one to take care of it, the place had started to collapse.

There were no tall buildings in that side of town, only manors of black Insomnia stone that now stood like empty skeletons, ruins with collapsed ceilings, broken windows and front lawns turned into a mess of overgrown grass and pale, withered trees. Miasma still rose from the floor in a thick cloud that rose up to their knees, and stuck to every fence and every wall, covering the world in a layer of ashes.

That place was dead, and the figures that had gotten that far and keep advancing further in were barely more than white-skinned ghosts, damned by their master. Chanyeol felt himself shiver as they passed by their side, their wide, open-mouthed smiles engraved in his mind even when he was actively trying not to look at them.

“What is he doing with this people?” he asked out loud, voice muffled by the ever growing music. The Southern District looked like a place of silence, and that melody shouldn’t be that loud, or so lively, not there. Chanyeol should have been whispering, not almost shouting to be heard.

“He’s leading them home,” Baekhyun replied. “All of them. Even if not all of them arrive.”

“Home?”

“His home. The Exalted’s mansion.”

Chanyeol saw it, soon after - the white manor at the end of the ash grey street. It had probably been a beautiful building once, a square mansion of lean lines and high windows, but its garden was dead and the stone of the walls crossed by cracks. The wrongness about it became more blatant as they approached - Baekhyun’s right hand gripping his cane, Chanyeol’s closed over the strap of the guitar hanging from his shoulder - because the house was too white, the walls broken but stainless, miasma floating all over the garden and the roof and curling around the spikes of the black fence, not getting in but getting out.

If Haze’s poison was a living thing, then that house was its beating heart. The place where it all had started.

And it was surrounded by people, smiling and laughing, in afternoon dresses and labour work, a whole crowd pressed against the fence, pushing each other and stretching their hands through the bars. Trying to get into where the music was.

“What now?” asked Chanyeol. “The gates are closed.”

Baekhyun’s hands lit up in the darkness. In that place, the glow in his veins looked almost gold. “Easy,” he replied. “We are breaking in.”

He strode towards the mansion, brow furrowed, miasma swirling and dissolving when it made contact with his skin. The crowd parted for him as well as soon as he stepped in, growling through their outstretched lips as if something in Baekhyun’s person was too bright, and Chanyeol followed suit, keeping his eyes in the closed front gate while he tried not to think about the sea of people and the miasma they had breathed in.

He’s ruining his own town.

“Haze!” Baekhyun exclaimed, voice firm over the noise. “Let’s get this over with, you hear me?”

The beat inside the house went on, louder. The army of citizens grunted and laughed, still staying away from the light. And, when Chanyeol thought nothing else would happen, the gates creaked and moved, slightly parting for Baekhyun to walk in.

“Let’s go,” he told Chanyeol. “Be ready.”

“Always behind you.”

Chanyeol remembered the garden from the visions he had seen in Haze’s mind: the wide front lawn, the two rows of trees and the large expanse of grass with its little, private lake; but the landscape in his dreams had been alive, and the place we were walking across was a withering mess of grey grass, twisted trunks and leafless branches, crooked like skeletal fingers.

By the time they arrived to the front steps, the main door cracked open, and a smiling, familiar figure in a dark uniform bowed at them from the threshold.

“Colonel Suho?” Chanyeol whispered.

The man gave no signs of having heard him, grin grotesque on his face as he spoke. “And so, the guests of honor arrive,” he greeted them, with a voice that was not quite his voice, and a rigid nod of his head that didn’t fit him at all. “We have no masks for you, I’m afraid. No masks for you. Master says you don’t deserve them.”

There was only noise surrounding his soul, too loud for Chanyeol to breach it. “He’s being controlled.”

Baekhyun barely spared him a glance. “Obviously,” he muttered, an undercurrent of urgency in his voice. “Not much we can do about it. We need to put an end to the source of this mess. There’s a mirror here and we have to break it. Whatever the cost.”

“I know that.” Chanyeol didn’t know if he was prepared to die, if nothing else worked. He didn’t know if Baekhyun was asking that of him, after all. “He’s waiting for us.”

“He always has loved to put up a show.”

The music stopped when they crossed the threshold. It had been loud enough for the walls to vibrate with the rhythm, a melody of string and wind as lively as the one that had been played in Baekhyun’s party all those weeks ago, but it turned out so fast, the silence that came after that so deep that Chanyeol thought it would swallow him.

“You’re expected in the main ballroom,” said Colonel Suho. “There, you will find what you’re looking for.”

Baekhyun nodded and led the way, walking into the high ceilinged corridor at the other side of the main door. Their steps echoed on the white marble floor as they made their way, strangely loud in the empty house. That place looked like a bigger and eerier version of the white rooms where Haze had taken Chanyeol in his dreams, all the walls made of colorless, veined marble carved with a cracked version of the floral designs that were so typical in the city.

It was almost like walking in a nightmare, holding one’s breath before things took a sudden turn for the worse. He was almost expecting to wake up only to find himself in the tiny guest room at Baekhyun’s apartment. And, when they stepped into the ballroom, he wished he could.

Because the whole place was a party of human statues. Living things, all of them still smiling and wearing black and white and red masks, all frozen in the middle of an eternal dance step.

“What has he done?” Chanyeol started, only to be interrupted by Baekhyun’s shocked gasp.

“Oh, no, no! Sehunnie!”

The boy had been grabbing a young woman’s hand when time had stopped for him. He had always had a natural grace to him, the kind of charm that made him look like a long-lost prince even when he was wearing labour clothes and was working on weapons with dirt in his hands and oil stains in his cheeks. Now, that charm had been lost to the stiffness so typical of Haze’s voice, a big smile so unnatural under the brim of his black half-mask that Chanyeol felt sick.

Baekhyun had run to him, placing a hand on his shoulder and softly squeezing. “Sehun,” he called. “Sehunnie.”

“He’s surrounded by noise,” whispered Chanyeol. He clenched his fists, nails digging crescents into his skin. “All of the people here… They’re beyond my reach.”

Baekhyun dropped his hand. “He did this on purpose. Most of the other people didn’t even make it here. Haze brought Sehun first. I’m sure he did, because of me.”

“I am friends with his reflection, and if he’s like this, then the one I know is going to be ill too.”

“He loves this. Playing with people. For god’s sake, Haze, what the hell do you want to achieve with this thing?”

Chanyeol stepped away from Sehun, trying not to think. That ballroom, with its puppet dancers and stale air, was the only one from the moment they had entered that was not completely white, but red instead. Dark crimson curtains were draped all around the walls, hiding the white stone with a shroud of vermillion, all the way to the dome of stained glass in the ceiling. All looked clean, and elegant, a party prepared specially for them where the host was nowhere to be found.

And at the far end of the room, in a small, raised stage next to the immobile music band, there was the mirror.

“Baekhyun,” called Chanyeol, feeling the ring of his own blood throbbing in his ears. “Look at this.”

He heard the sound of the steps as the other boy walked to his side, his sharp intake of breath before he spoke. “He wants us to play by his rules, doesn’t he?”

Chanyeol took one step towards the mirror, and then another, crossing the room among the sea of frozen dancers. Baekhyun was still at his side as he went up to the raised stage and stretched his arm out to graze the glass.

“What are you going to do?” the other boy asked.

As Chanyeol saw it, they could leave the room immediately, forget about Haze’s grotesque party and try to look for him all around that house. But he already knew they wouldn’t find him and that his calling would bring more people to the South District with the passing of every minute. They were deep into the enemy’s territory, but they would lose if they retreated and what they needed the most was to lure the man out.

“I am breaking this thing. Are you okay with that?”

Baekhyun nodded, stern. “That’s what I came here for, whatever happens after that. Go on.”

“Whatever happens.”

Chanyeol inhaled, situating himself in front of the looking glass and closing his eyes as he focused on the music and his guitar. There were only two melodies to listen to in that place, Baekhyun’s violins and the song that was always with him, that rhythm that was everywhere in the world and that now surrounded him with the insistent beat of drums.

He was ready. He had to be ready and he called, turning the instrument on and feeling the magitec core heat up against his body. He knew the song by now and he played it by heart, commanding the mirror in front of him to obey, to crack and break and be forever destroyed. That thing was supposed to be your way back home, an annoying little voice said at the back of his head, but Baekhyun had asked him what he wanted and that was it - he would find another way; he’ll wait until winter and then sing to frozen ponds. He would remain there for as long as he needed to, he would lock himself in if he couldn’t go back, because if he let Haze be, his reflection would destroy much more than Insomnia City.

Baekhyun was right when he said that they needed to force those worlds apart.

He could control the music, and he forced the sound upon the glass. He felt the strain in his body, growing in his blood as the cracks extended through the polished surface of the mirror. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know he was succeeding. He heard the cracking sound and then the pieces of glass were falling down.

He felt the power after that, making his blood burn, destabilizing his own magic as it settled in. His song faded, back to a place where he couldn’t reach it.

And it was done. For the moment. Done.

Baekhyun’s hand closed around his wrist, warm on his sweaty skin. “Chanyeol,” he whispered, urgent.

Another voice replied before he could. “Ah, that’s right, Chanyeol, you did so well. Aren’t you proud of yourself, little boy?”

The whole room came to life in the moment it took Chanyeol to turn around, bursting with laughter and music. The band was playing again, a lovely jazzy song with trumpets and piano, and all the dancers moved to the rhythm as if they had never been in stasis. Only one person remained still smirking at them from the threshold.

He wore a long coat of pure white, hair pushed back and silver mask covering the upper half of his face. Despite its cover, and as he made his way towards the place Baekhyun and him were, Chanyeol could clearly see the cracks forming on his skin and the miasma that oozed from them. The song raised in a crescendo with every step he took, reaching its climax as he arrived before the raised stage, surrounded by a crowd of dancing ghosts, swirling in a sea of velvet, cotton and silk.

They stopped when Haze did, leaning their bodies towards him as he rose through the steps with the hint of a predatory smile on his lips. He was in his home, surrounded by his own slaves, and he carried himself like a king. “Ah, if it isn’t Chanyeol and Baekhyun - the impostor and the traitor. How have you two been?”

Baekhyun’s eyes narrowed into slits as he stepped between a still unstable Chanyeol and his reflection. “Quite a nice ball you have here. It surpasses every dance party I have ever prepared, I have to say, and I work at that.”

“So you’re enjoying your welcome?”

“Maybe I would, if my friends weren’t in the crowd.”

“Ah, Oh Sehun and the Colonel. They really wanted to come, you see, as did Mr. Zhang and that magitec engineer associate of yours. A pity that there was some kind of… inconvenience that prevented it, you see. Same with my dearest mother. The way she uses her magic to resist the rot in her blood makes her impossible to persuade. Isn’t it a shame?”

Baekhyun didn’t take the bait. “What have you done with these people?”

“The good citizens of Insomnia have lost track of what’s good for them. They were deceived, by the Blessed Order and my mother’s government, and that has moved them to betray me out of sheer ignorance. They have been turning their backs on me for years, but they are too easily manipulated to know better, so I’ve made them see the light.” The crowd cheered for Haze as he spoke, a low roar born in bowed heads and paralyzed bodies. “Despite not being aware of it, all of these people had already let me in, even those who think themselves to be completely free of my influence. Who hasn’t breathed a bit of miasma once in their lives after all?”

Baekhyun took a step forward. “You— Why are you making such an effort to destroy this city?”

“I am not destroying it,” replied Haze. “What you’ve never understood is that I’m saving Insomnia. I’m enhancing it, turning it into the place it was supposed to be, but I require the help of every citizen for that. It’s the least they can give me after all I sacrificed.”

“They are infected.”

“But being this way, they know no pain! They are happy! And it doesn’t matter if the process is still incomplete, because they provide me with the energy I need to make them perfect. It’s the only option I have left after your Chanyeol rejected the chance to help me. The souls of the good people of Insomnia will open the doors of change!”

“What the hell are you saying?”

Chanyeol swallowed, feeling his legs shake. “The gate between worlds,” he whispered. “He told that to me when he tried to take control of my mind. He wanted to use me so he could mess with the bond.”

Baekhyun clenched his fists at his sides. “The energy,” he said. “You’re taking the energy of our side of the mirror.”

Smirking, Haze shrugged. “Your world has too much energy and no people with the capacity to put it to use. The Blessed Order love using all of that balance nonsense as an excuse, but they have always been blind.”

A disturbance in that balance had made Chanyeol’s mother sick, and he almost could see her, wandering across the empty hallways at their apartment, hidden behind a wall of darkened glass. He recalled Baekhyun too, the first time Haze had seen him, curled in his bed and not even scared of looking at the god of death straight in the eye. “If you drain the energy of our world, you’ll destroy it.”

“And what if one side of the mirror has to die for the other to flourish?”

“You’ll doom your own world too! The lack of balance will destroy Insomnia, don’t you see it?” Baekhyun exclaimed.

Haze was still smiling, so satisfied with himself, an actor in the last act of his play, and Chanyeol looked at him and realized. There was a conclusion Baekhyun had come up to; others could have thought the same. “No,” he whispered. “He will steal our energy. And then he’ll break the bond. He’ll keep it all and leave our people to die.”

Baekhyun visibly paled. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Ah, but why wouldn’t I, Baekhyunnie?”

“You can’t. You’re one man. Taking the energy of a whole world and closing the bond. You’re only a man and you’re—”

Haze turned around, the tails of his white coat fluttering around his legs as he walked to the front of his public. The noise was everywhere, the kind of low buzz that got into the back on one’s head until your brain started to hurt - a dull, constant kind of pain. “Alone, do you mean to say? Is that what you imply?” he asked. It was true that he was as human as Chanyeol, but he looked like a masked god as he stood, back straight, in the middle of his very own crowd of worshippers. The cracks were already fading from his skin, his lower cheeks and chin as smooth and unnaturally pale as the rest of him. “That, Baekhyun, is the destiny of the ones like me. The place where I stand is unachievable for common mortals; it was my mistake to try to mingle with them. I don’t need to be loved by Insomnia, you see: if they have to fear me to be saved, so be it. Power is the only thing I need, because with that power I will do great things. My mother, the Blessed Order and you were the ones who tried to take that power from me, but to no avail. There’s one thing you have lo learn, little boy, and that is that people like you will never be a match for the ones like me, no matter how hard you try to stop me. Be my guest, will you? Because there is something I’ve been wanting so hard to show you.”

Haze raised his hands up high, smile as wide as the ones in his puppet’s faces, and, all at once, the red curtains draped around the walls of the room fell. A gasp came out of Baekhyun’s lips, and it sounded so shocked and pained that Chanyeol felt the impulse to rush to him beneath the waves of his own paralyzing surprise.

It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.

Baekhyun and the others had organized the Purge so all the mirrors in Insomnia would be destroyed, but the walls in that room were full of them. They covered the whole surface of them, from floor to ceiling, some small and round, others big enough for a man to fit it, all of them showing them different angles of the same distorted reflection. Everywhere he looked, Chanyeol could see Haze. The lord in white, surrounded by miasma.

“How?” Baekhyun whispered, voice hoarse. “We broke them all before you— The marshal raided the city for them all. You couldn’t have—”

“You think yourself very clever, don’t you?” replied Haze, voice sweet as honey. He was the only one moving amidst his garden of human statues, and his face looked strangely expressive when he took his mask out. “You believed you could deceive me, dethrone me and get away with it. You used my only fleeting moment of weakness to get rid of my control for a while, but that doesn’t mean you could avoid me forever. You organized this whole little plan in secret, but who knows? Maybe you were also the one who whispered it to me in the dead of the night. You tried so hard to carry on back then, but deep down you were so weak… Who knows, maybe you weren’t only a traitor to me and the people in this town, but also a traitor to yourself. Such an unworthy reflection.”

Baekhyun shook his head. “You’re lying.”

“They fixed you up so well after your little plan was a success. Was it a reward for your services? Because maybe they should consider taking it off.”

“You are lying! I didn’t tell a single thing to you!”

“Are you certain of that?”

“Baekhyun!” That time, Chanyeol rushed to his side, keeping him steady by the shoulders. The other boy looked livid, light pulsing beneath his skin, illuminating in gold the veins in his hands, face and neck.

“Chanyeol,” he muttered. “Get Sehun out.”

“What?”

“No matter if your powers don’t work here. Do what you can and get him out.”

“Baekhyun, don’t—”

“I am so tired of you, Your Exalted Majesty.” The boy freed himself of Chanyeol’s hold and started descending the steps, slowly. His whole skin was glowing now, so bright it was almost blinding, and Chanyeol could clearly hear the ring in his blood, the melody in his soul finally unleashing, a cry of pain and the steady bit of determination all over the buzz, muting it. “You took me away from my world, because you lied and I believed you. You gave me a city I loved and deceived me so I destroyed it when I thought I was helping. You made me weak, you made me worthless, you made me a walking disgrace in this world, but you know what? You didn’t break me, and now you can’t get inside my head. You’ve almost ruined me, but as hard as you tried to make me like you, I am not the one who destroyed every single one of the things that I love. You’re going down, Haze, and I am the one who’s ending you.”

Haze sighed, shaking his head, and Chanyeol felt something viscous and disgusting falling from his skin - the magic of the shield that still protected him. “He’s unguarded!” he shouted. “His magical protection is gone!”

“Ah, but of course. I am trying to make the fight a bit fairer for everyone. You should be thankful, Baekhyunnie. Despite your… personality, you still have a very handsome face. I don’t want it disfigured by burns when I bury you.”

Baekhyun snorted as he reached the main floor. “Don’t pretend you’re doing this for me,” he said.

And then, he attacked.

Cane in hand, he dashed towards Haze, blade singing as he aimed it for his chest. For a moment, Chanyeol thought the paralyzed citizens of Insomnia would get into motion, controlled by his master to protect his body, but when they actually moved what they did was to step back, leaving space at the middle of the room for Haze to maneuver. He was graceful, a moonlight shadow to Baekhyun’s sharpness, and evaded the blow with an apparent ease by putting himself out of reach. But Baekhyun was persistent and he insisted again, aiming for Haze’s feet, going for his face, not losing his ground when his rival finally unsheathed the decorative blade he carried at his hip and steel met steel.

They were fast, and lethal, and beautiful as dancers in the middle of their last waltz. Chanyeol was enthralled for a second - Haze, surrounded by an expanding cloud of thick miasma, and Baekhyun, who vanished it under rays of golden light. That was Baekhyun’s fight, and he wanted to watch. Haze was strong, and he wanted to help. And instead, what he did was to run, mentally urging his own body to assimilate the power he had gained, and stepping, guitar still strapped to his shoulder, towards the immobile crowd of Haze’s slaves.

He had last seen Sehun in that side of the room and he needed to get to him, and he needed to do so soon so he could help. Come on, let’s get you out. Come on!

“So I see you have kept up with your training as a fighter after all,” Haze was saying, slightly panting as he blocked one of Baekhyun’s vicious attacks. “You were always an avid learner. Pity that you never could get the most important lessons.”

“Pity that you couldn’t wire them into my brain!”

All the faces in the crowd looked the same, masked and smiling and still, as Chanyeol made his way forward. An old man. A woman. A girl in a dark blue afternoon dress. A man in laborer clothes. Face after face after face in the same never-ending nightmare. Haze’s noise was floating around him, making him nauseous and unfocused. Don’t listen to that, come on. You need to concentrate. Sehun had always been so easily recognizable, not only by his mannerisms and voice and face, but by his song. He sounded so emo-rock, a little act of defiance in a world of classical and military marches. That music had been muted by Haze’s noise, but it was there, somewhere, below the chaos. It had to be.

If only he could listen to it. If only.

If he could call to it.

Baekhyun and Haze were still fighting around them. The miasma was getting to where he was, cold and humid as he breathed it in. But still, he couldn’t be touched, and he wouldn’t be attacked, so he closed his eyes and placed his fingers on the strings of his guitar.

He couldn’t listen to Sehun’s song, but he had heard it so many times that he remembered the sound of it. The first chords came out inaccurate, slightly discordant, but the music took shape in his brain and his fingers as he proceeded, louder and faster and clearer. He could do that. He had to do that, and it was something he needed so he did, letting out a call and waiting for its response.

Until, finally, he got it.

It was faint at first, so much that Chanyeol was concerned that it could be an echo, but he kept playing and he found a reply in the sound, just there, wanting to be heard. As expected from our rebel prince, huh? He focused on that and kept it on his mind, humming lowly to the sound so it didn’t disappear. Then, he put down his guitar and ran, following the thread of sound.

“Don’t be such a unmannerly guest, my dear reflection,” Haze’s voice came from somewhere at his left. He looked to his side and saw the other man almost on him, the crowd opening for him as he advanced. “It’s not your place to play your little song in another man’s party!”

“It’s not him you’re fighting!”

Baekhyun came just after him, hidden blades peeking from his sleeves, gleaming with the same gold light that surrounded him. The whole room illuminated in white when he attacked.

“You are starting to annoy me, boy!” Haze replied. He turned towards Baekhyun, and the boy fell to the ground, covering his ears with a scream. Chanyeol was going to run to him, Sehun almost forgotten, when light surrounded the other boy’s body in a shimmering barrier and he got up.

“You need to improve your tricks, Haze,” he hissed, looking at Chanyeol for the fraction of a second before the dashed forward again. “Go!” he exclaimed, light curling around Haze’s dark puffs of miasma. “Come on, go!”

The force of his power threw Haze against the closest wall, back colliding with one of the bigger mirrors. Chanyeol had expected the glass to crack, but instead it liquified and swallowed the man in, turning solid after he had completely disappeared beneath. He looked up just the second he reappeared at one of the mirrors above them, lips curved up in a savage smirk.

“Oh, little boy, is that the best you’ve got?”

Baekhyun jump up, the light burning so bright in his chest that it was starting to charr his shirt and jacket. “I am going to stop you!” he exclaimed.

He didn’t know how much time he had left, so Chanyeol ran.

The thread of Sehun’s sound took him to the rightmost corner of the ballroom. The boy was there, still smiling, and Chanyeol took the mask off to observe his face, calling his name. He looked as dead as a doll, eyes open, skin unnaturally pale and veins already starting to darken under his skin. He remained paralyzed when the boy tried to push him out of the room, unresponsive, like he was more dead than he had ever been alive.

“You have to come with me,” he said. “We have no time. You need to get out of this place.”

There was no reply, but this time, Chanyeol had a thread of sound and he used it. Haze was powerful, but he was fighting Baekhyun, influencing half a town and controlling the whole group of people of that ballroom, and in the end he only was a man. A human man, who shared energy and a soul with Chanyeol.

We are one and the same, bond by the soulstream. So if he can, then I have to.

There was noise, resistance, for a second, two, three, and then it was over. Sehun’s grotesque smile didn’t fade, but at least he moved. Chanyeol could hear the music now, loud and clear, but strangely distorted. It was so frail, malleable; he could have done whatever he wanted with it. Instead, he tried to bring it back to its original shape. It was a song he remembered, a song he could play by heart. He did it the best he could, and when he finished he added something else - a command, deep in the younger boy’s soul. You want to go back to the tunnels. You want to run away from this place. You’re scared, you want to leave. And you will, now. And you’ll be okay. I’ll assure you.

Sehun nodded, face falling into expressionlessness, and then to fear. He stood there shaking for a moment, tormented by demons Chanyeol himself had placed inside of his head, paralyzed as the mirrors showed them the kaleidoscope scene of the battle around them. The boy didn’t know what he was seeing; he didn’t know if he had messed up with his head, or if the miasma was already too deep in him, trapping him in a place he wouldn’t be able to come back from.

His friend, then one in his world, would be affected as well. It was like losing two people at the same time.

“Sehun,” he called.

The boy blinked, eyes focusing on him at last. “I can’t be here,” he mumbled. “You don’t understand. I have to run. I’m sorry, Chanyeol.”

“Don’t be,” the boy replied.

His friend looked at him, face strangely open, and ran. No one tried to stop him. No one realized. And Chanyeol just stayed where he was and let him go. After that, he took a long breath and turned around.

And he saw Baekhyun standing alone in the middle of the room, body ablaze and heart on fire.

Even his hair seemed on fire, lit in red and white and gold, radiance coming from him in waves and vanishing the poisonous fog with every throb. Haze was gone, and Chanyeol rose his gaze to search for him and he rushed to meet Baekhyun. When he saw him, he was coming from the ceiling, body materializing out of one of his many mirrors, sword in hand and smile in his face.

Baekhyun was ready, deadly serious and on guard, but Chanyeol realized a little too late that his reflection wasn’t coming for the other boy, but for him instead.

“Watch out!” Baekhyun shouted, setting into motion.

Chanyeol threw himself at the floor, cursing when he felt the impact of his body against the cold white stone. He curled around his guitar, trying to get up, and he knew Haze was there, but Baekhyun was faster. He rose his cane to meet Haze’s sword, both weapons colliding with the screeching song of steel against steel.

He stood, as fast as he could, at the same moment Haze drew back.

“You okay?” asked Baekhyun through clenched teeth. “Can you help the other ones?”

If he tried hard enough, Chanyeol could hear his own song, the one that was always with his, vibrating under the constant noise in the room. He could hold onto that one, he could try to play, but still— “Maybe I could get them all at the same time, but Haze’s too strong. He’ll block me.”

“Can you break the mirrors?”

“One by one? My powers are still—”

Baekhyun flashed a smile at him. The collar of his shirt was starting to burn out, the trace of his veins golden under his skin. “Try your best, will you? I will protect you.”

Haze was coming back at them again, this time from behind them, and Baekhyun’s light shield is wide to cover Chanyeol, too. The boy sensed the wave of noise before he felt it, a blast destined to hurt and incapacitate and make his head hurt. When he looked at Baekhyun, he realized there were glistening beads of sweat on his forehead and temples.

“I know this is a bad moment to say it, but don’t overdo it. Please?”

Baekhyun actually laughed - a pretty, husky sound. “Finish your part quick and I won’t have to. Now go!”

There was something in Baekhyun when he was like that. A radiance, a cry, an energy that normally was suppressed deep inside him and that was suddenly out. In a world made of noise, he was surrounded by music, a melody entwined with the song Chanyeol always heard, in tune with it.

It made the boy want to be as strong, try as hard.

He had a part to do, so he gripped his guitar and went.

He heard the clash of steel behind him, saw the blinding flash of light. There was no time for thinking, so he focused on the music, commanded it to be louder and focused on one of the biggest mirrors, just in front of him. I’ve done this a thousand times. I’m prepared for this.

His guitar warmed under his fingertips, magitec generator bringing it to life, light flashing bright red as he played his song. The surface of the mirror undulated, trembling before the bright cracks began to form. “Splinter,” he hummed, and the looking glass listened and Haze screamed.

“What about now?” he heard Baekhyun ask, voice sharp as a hidden blade.

There were hundreds of mirrors in the room; Chanyeol went for the next big one. He could feel the power entering him, a momentary peak of strength before his energy destabilized further. It felt like a wave he could ride, and he used it to attack the next mirror, focusing on it and not thinking of anything else. He was powerful; Soul Magic was his to command and all the looking glasses of Insomnia would do as he wanted.

Break, he thought, and a second mirror cracked. Crack, splinter, explode.

He only stopped when he heard a scream coming from the other side of the room. A curse coming from a voice that was exactly the same as his.

When he turned around, Baekhyun had one of the hidden blades of his wrist to Haze’s cracked neck.

“I got you,” he said. “I finally got you.”

Chanyeol could see them clearly from where he was: Haze kneeling on the floor, head tilted up, and Baekhyun almost on him, with his back to Chanyeol and his whole body gleaming golden.

“You’ve always had an outstanding control of light magic, I have to say,” Haze was saying. “But that’s not surprising. Your other half was the best bender of shadow I have ever seen. None of the other idiots in the Order he served were half as capable as he was.”

“Don’t you dare mention him!” Baekhyun replied.

“Oh, you’ve always been so angry with me, little boy. But well then, you’ve got me now. There’s no shield on me, so aren’t you going to kill me?”

Chanyeol’s breath hitched. The constant beat of music was leaving his fingers, and perhaps he should have kept it and continued playing, but Haze had been weakened, and Baekhyun had him, and he couldn’t help but watch. He moved towards his right along the wall, so he could see the boy’s face, hard and beautiful, burning with passion and rage.

“You didn’t ruin me,” he growled. “And you won’t be ruining me again anymore.”

“Of course I won’t.” On the floor, Haze shrugged. He was still smiling, not concerned at all, when he raised a gloved hand to grip Baekhyun by the chin and tilt his head down. The gesture looked strangely intimate, the softness in it essentially wrong. “But now, you waited for years, so kill me. Can you? Will you?”

Chanyeol’s blood turned as cold as miasma in his veins. He thought Baekhyun would do it, in that same moment. That he would sink the blade in Haze’s neck to fulfill his duty. He was almost expecting it, anticipating the moment and dreading it because of what it meant, and almost didn’t understand what was going on when Baekhyun hesitated.

Clearly amused, Haze laughed. “Ah, so that’s how it is. You crave to, but you can’t kill me, because that will hurt your boy over there. This is not only about what you want, but about what you want more. Poor little Baekhyunnie; yours is such a sad story.”

Baekhyun pressed the blade against Haze’s neck. It drew blood, thick and red over the pristine white of his skin. “Keep quiet!”

“Am I bothering you? I am just stating a truth. You were unwanted as an original, unworthy as a reflection. You should be dead but you’re still breathing and you had the bad luck to develop feelings for the right reflection at the wrong time, so you now must sacrifice others instead of just yourself. What a tragedy.”

“I told you to shut up!”

Chanyeol stared at the room around him. At the miasma that still covered the room up to his knees; the same miasma that has affected Sehun and his mother, turned the city of dreams into a nightmare. He let go of the guitar that still hung from his neck. “Do it!” he exclaimed.

Baekhyun turned his head to look at him. His right, uncovered eye looked huge in his face. “What?” he whispered, just loud enough for Chanyeol to hear.

Baekhyun, who wasn’t really that bad, under all his layers and shields. Baekhyun, who deserved salvation as much as he did.

“You’ve got him! You have to do it! It’s your chance, while he’s weak!”

Haze clicked his tongue. “Look at you two,” he said. “My favorite kind of star-crossed lovers.”

What came next happened too fast. Baekhyun didn’t even have time to reach when Haze sent a wave of noise in his direction, throwing him back on the cold floor.

“Wait, no, Baekhyun!” Chanyeol called, but he realized too late that his reflection was not going for the other boy, but for him instead. Haze had turned towards the closest mirror, and when Chanyeol blinked he wasn’t there anymore, but at his side of the room, coming from the looking glass behind his back like an apparition, gripping him and painfully twisting his right arm so he could hold him still from behind, voice a poisonous whisper on his ear.

“You could leave, you know?” he told him. “There is no shield on you anymore, and Baekhyun won’t be able to follow. Have you thought about it? There are one hundred mirrors for you to choose from in this room. You could go back to your world and pray for me to spare you.”

Haze forced him to turn him around, face to the mirror. Baekhyun was calling his name somewhere behind them, but even if he didn’t want to look, Chanyeol’s eyes focused on the polished glass surface, and in the wall it was trembling and changing, turning into a window to another place, a city he knew so well.

“You should enjoy this while it lasts. It’s what you wanted from the start: to go home. And I would allow you, you know? Take this as a favor from me to you. A chance for the child who has my face. Won’t you take it?”

Wide eyed, Chanyeol stared at the street at the other side of the looking glass. The familiarity was excruciatingly painful: he missed the crowded streets, and the cars, his works shifts at the video game store. He missed being the unluckiest boy in the world, the kind who would never score a date with someone as good-looking as Byun Baekhyun and worked long shifts at the video game store. He had been a normal boy, back at home, and he had turned into a powerful wizard by traveling across an enchanted looking glass. He had tried both realities, and already knew which one he preferred.

He had never loved his city so much as now that he was seeing it as something he had already lost for good.

“What are you suggesting?” he asked, voice shaking. “That I go back to my family and friends so no one resists you when you shatter my world into pieces? That I leave Baekhyun alone? I am not stupid, Haze: you do favors to no one.”

He could feel Haze smile against his skin. “What a pity, Park Chanyeol. You might not be such an unworthy reflection as I thought you were.” The street at the other side of the mirror trembled and faded until only glass remained. “You might be brave, a little honorable boy, but that’s how the stupid die. I won’t end you now, but I’ll deal with you once the bond between worlds has been torn apart. And about Baekhyun…”

The room was fully illuminated, by pulsating, golden light. Haze released Chanyeol, pushed him forward against the mirror. His guitar collided with the glass.

“I am your rival here, you bastard!” someone was screaming. Baekhyun.

Go away. You don’t have to get close. You know he’s more powerful than he looks, you know— You were never close to killing him. “Baekhyun! Don’t go for him!”

The boy didn’t listen. Haze laughed and launched forward.

And, by the time Chanyeol could register what had happened, Haze had dragged Baekhyun towards the center of the room and was keeping him in place as he had taken hold of Chanyeol just before. The scene was almost the same, but Baekhyun looked weaker, more tired, golden light still glowing under his skin, but veins too marked on the surface. As if they were wounds. Cracks. Climbing up his neck and peeking out from under the patch over his left eye like the skeletal legs of a spider.

“Now it’s me who’s got you,” Haze stated, smirking directly at Chanyeol. “And there’s something you should remember, little boy: I was the one who made you, so keep in mind that I can destroy you. Is that what you’re looking for?”

“Let him go!” Chanyeol exclaimed.

“Do you want me to? Ah, you’re so afraid for Baekhyunnie, right? You don’t want me to hurt him.” Baekhyun was putting up one hell of a fight, struggling to break free from Haze’s hold, but either his rival was too strong or his previous duel had weakened him too much, because he screamed, skin still dark gold and heart burning in his chest, when Haze twisted his arm behind his back. “You see, Chanyeol, it doesn’t exactly matter if he’s hurt or not. He’s far too gone: you’re trying to fight for a ghost. Hasn’t he told you?”

“What in the world are you—” Chanyeol perfectly knew - had always known - that Haze loved to play with the truth, modifying it until facts got twisted. Every time he listened things went wrong, so he had learned not to, so he already had half of his curtest reply out when he saw Baekhyun’s face. The glow in his skin was dimming, but the dark traces of his veins were still there and the boy was staring right at him - not shocked or angry, but ashamed. Afraid. It was Baekhyun himself who had told him the day before that he wasn’t sick with Euphoria, but that his reflection has been.

He didn’t know what kind of expression his own face was spotting, but Haze laughed right at him. “He loves keeping his secrets, this one. What kind of story did he tell you, about that eyepatch he has? Did he got his wound at the battlefront, at a work accident…? Or was it the pirates? It’s always the pirates when he wants to impress.”

Baekhyun had turned completely still, his chest rising and falling in shallow intakes of breath. It reminded Chanyeol of the dreams Haze had showed him, where Baekhyun was all too soft, and too expressionless and too pliant. Not himself at all.

Not himself at all.

“What did you do with Baekhyun’s reflection?” he asked, voice barely coming out. “After you damaged and destroyed all he was?”

“I kept him safe.”

Still in his hold, Baekhyun let out the shadow of a laugh. “Sure you did. You made him so fucking sick that he didn’t know where he was. So much for safety.”

“Where is he?” Chanyeol repeated.

Haze took a moment to answer. “Even after all, he betrayed me again,” he said. Baekhyun was looking straight at Chanyeol. Right in the eye, so honest, so sad, so brutal. “He took his own life right before the Purge.”

The words were a gust of cold wind right in Chanyeol’s head. He felt like he was falling, falling, without a chance to get up. He understood now, why Baekhyun’s song was normally so suffocating, because he was already choking with his own words, with the open look in the other boy’s face.

“But that…” he started. “That can’t be. If the other Baekhyun’s dead, then… But how long ago was the Purge?”

“Too long ago, indeed, but I told you: your boy is a ghost. The people he sold me to when he betrayed me still despised him, but they agreed to fix him. They needed someone alive to blame. My mother did not agree, of course, and neither did the Blessed Order but Baekhyunnie here has many friends who needed a martyr to fight their battles. What they did to him is not permanent: look at what it’s doing to his body.”

Haze took hold of the front of Baekhyun’s charred shirt and pulled, tearing the blackened fabric down. The boy’s light flickered and went out, and what remained were only the cracks, still thin and new as they travelled down his neck, but growing wider from his collarbones down, blackened and wide as they went closer to his heart - or, more specifically, the pulsing, burning thing above it, buried deep in his skin. A thing that looked strikingly similar to the magitec generator Sehun and Jongdae had installed in Chanyeol’s guitar.

Baekhyun was not looking at him.

“What’s— What’s that?”

“A terrible mistake. It keeps him alive, I suppose, and safe from the reach of my mind, but have you seen what it does to his magic? He used to be the best light bender in all Insomnia. I’d rather be dead than so… crippled.”

Baekhyun started to struggle again, cheeks flushed red in shame but gaze as hard as the black Insomnia stone. Chanyeol took a step forward, looking for the music beneath the noise. What he found was nausea instead, the kind of weakness that came to him when his powers were still destabilized. Fuck.

“Better be crippled that controlled by someone like you,” hissed Baekhyun. The metallic circle in his chest turned hot, bright white as the boy activated his powers again. “I might be a living ghost, but it’s my duty to take you down with me when I go!”

Haze’s hands let go at the same moment Chanyeol started running towards them. “Do you really?”

Baekhyun turned around, fast, shield of light starting to take shape around him. Haze stretched his right hand towards the boy’s chest. Chanyeol knew then what was going to happen, but the only thing he could do was to scream a warning at the top of his lungs at the same, precise moment when his reflection sent a shockwave of sound to the device buried in Baekhyun’s chest.

There was a spark of lightning. Baekhyun’s shield grew huge and exploded, blinding Chanyeol as he advanced, and the next thing he knew was that something heavy and warm had collided against him, throwing him to the floor. When he managed to open his eyes and move through the sudden burst of flame, the first thing he saw was Baekhyun’s face.

“Hey,” he called, trying to sit, holding the boy by the waist as he did. The eyepatch was gone from his face, little cracks forming a small, chipped cobweb at the corner of his left eye. Baekhyun blinked without seeing him, the iris and pupil of a crystallized grayish-blue. He was barely conscious, the round thing in his chest a black, charred mess. “Baekhyun. Look at me. Baekhyun, please.”

The boy raised his head, eyes unfocused. “He kept him in a locked room,” he whispered. “He was sad, so sad. He loved him, despite everything.”

“Baekhyun, listen. You have to listen,” Chanyeol started, heart hammering in his chest. Everything had been okay that morning. Baekhyun had been okay. That couldn’t be happening. He had to get better; he wouldn’t allow that to happen.

Baekhyun’s head fell on his chest. “I really want to go home.”

Chanyeol felt like crying. Chanyeol felt like screaming. Instead, he forced himself to look up - to Haze, before him.

“I should have done that before. Looking at him made me feel nostalgic, but it was useless to keep him. He is not my boy.”

But he’s mine.

His guitar was on the floor at his side, the strap broken after Baekhyun had collided against him. The red lights were off, but perhaps it still worked. It had to, because he needed to fight. Because, in his arms, Baekhyun was still breathing and he didn’t know how long that would last.

“You’ve gone too far,” he whispered, placing the boy on the marble floor and reaching for his guitar before he faced Haze. “You don’t even realize what you’re doing to people, right? You don’t care.”

“I care for the greater good of my world. You would too, if you were in my place. You don’t understand what it means to be the chosen one.”

His power was still there, in an unstable, incomplete way, still adjusting to his blood and the beat of his soul. He had felt a peak of strength when he had broken the mirrors, but after the rise came the fall with it the exhaustion. Perhaps, if he was able to rest. Perhaps, if he had enough time and skill to break another mirror and ride the high before it faded.

He was in the middle of a fight he couldn’t win. And both he and Haze knew.

“You’re not chosen. You’re mad.”

“Visionaries have always been misunderstood. But of course, you would never understand. I’ve given you the choice to join me and rule, or to go home and surrender, and you have decided not to listen. You are the one who chose the path where he stands.”

“As you did.” Chanyeol focused on the buzz and the music. He had to do something, and he would only have a chance. His own melody shielded him, keeping him warm and awake - a music that was everywhere in the world, even when everything else was silence. What do I do? He asked. What should I do?

Behind him, Baekhyun whimpered. He was awake, Chanyeol realized, his song wrapped around his own, calling him, calling. It was so weak it was almost inaudible, but it still was there.

“We are two sides of the same soul, but we’re not the same. That was a thing I learned when I first saw you. So you see, we’ve both chosen, yes, but your decision has to be mediocre while mine has been to become the force this world needs. It was a mistake on my side to offer you salvation: you chose the ugly reality over the ideal dream. And now, what do you have? Your mother is crazy, your best friend is infected and Baekhyun will die. It’s funny how your life is slowly becoming the mirror image of my own tragedy, huh?”

He had listened to Baekhyun’s song for such a long time since he had arrived that he could recognize it as soon as he heard. He could detect the little changes, the variations in the score. He was able to interpret them. Baekhyun had always kept secrets, but the melody in his soul had always been honest when one knew how to read.

And so he knew the boy was conscious, and asking something of him.

So he listened and played his part.

“I don’t think that’s the case,” he said. He reached inside himself, concentrating on the last remnants of his power. Every nerve protested, but the energy responded, and the pain beneath his ribs was sharp as the edges of a star, but he endured it with his best smile. “You control noise; I have music. You destroy and I protect: we’re opposites.”

Baekhyun’s song was faint but clear. He closed his eyes and turned the volume up.

“What—” Haze snapped. All the mirrors were vibrating behind him, under his command. Chanyeol wouldn’t have been able to break them fast enough to leave Haze defenseless. His power wasn’t exactly offensive, but Baekhyun could fight.

“Hello again, Your Exalted Majesty,” the boy said, standing on firm legs at Chanyeol’s side. His skin was still covered in sweat, a rain of silver-gold sparks coming from the broken generator in his chest, but he looked stronger than ever. Unleashed. “How have you been? I hope you’re fine.”

He rose his hands, turning incandescent, golden light beaming from the cracks on his skin. A glowing barrier formed around Chanyeol and him, so bright that the boy had to cover his eyes. Miasma around their feet curled and thinned, dissolved by the radiance around them. The world turned the color of gold as the sphere around them grew, consuming and purifying and leaving Chanyeol a little breathless.

Haze’s puppets had been standing, frozen, at the corners of the room, and the man screamed in rage when they all fell to the floor, their strings cut.

“Ah, are you angry about that?” Baekhyun asked with a short laugh. “Oops, sorry.”

He glanced towards Chanyeol, faint smile still on his lips, before throwing himself at Haze, cane forgotten somewhere on the floor, but hidden blades protruding from under his sleeves. They were longer now, brighter, edges of pure light. He was before Haze before the other man could send noise to stop him, his right blade tracing an arc shaped like a golden, crescent moon before sinking in the crook between Haze’s shoulder and neck.

Blood stained the white fabric red. Haze took a step back, shaking. Chanyeol could see a patch of skin now, as cracked as Baekhyun’s was, under his clothes.

He tried to reach for his powers to force the fallen people to escape, but he barely had any energy left.

“Run!” shouted Baekhyun. He was at his side in a second, grabbing his hand and pulling, guiding him towards the door of the ballroom, across the hallway and out of the house. He was panting, too pale, but his grip was firm and his steps fast, and so Chanyeol didn’t ask and just followed, fighting the nausea to keep the rhythm.

The controlled citizens of Insomnia were still at the other side of the gate, but they weren’t fighting to get in anymore. Everything was still and quiet except for them, the two running shapes who made miasma dissolve with every step, two bright black spots in a world of shades of grey.

They were almost out of the South District when Baekhyun’s step faltered. It was only a small pause in his rhythm at first, but then he stumbled with his own feet, losing his balance. He collapsed without a single sound, dragging Chanyeol with him when he tried to hold him. They had been running a second ago, and in a heartbeat the gleam beneath Baekhyun’s skin had faded away and all that remained was a scared boy holding the limp body of a man so pale that he looked almost as a corpse.

The cracks were still there, darkened and ugly and terrifying. Chanyeol would have sworn he could see them getting wider by the second if he just stared.

“Baekhyun,” he called. “Baekhyun?!”

Sehun’s words, his insistence of not letting that boy use his powers, was booming in his head, loud and constant and horrible, the beat of a ritual drum before a sacrifice. The generator was broken, and Baekhyun’s powers had been unleashed, but at what price?

Baekhyun’s reflection was dead. The magitec thing in his chest had been keeping him alive.

“Home,” the boy mumbled again, voice so, so weak. “I want to go home.”

They didn’t have a place to go back to, not then, not in that city anymore, but Chanyeol did the best thing that he could. He tied the two ends of the broken strap of his guitar with a double knot so he could hang the thing from his back and then used his arms to press Baekhyun’s unconscious body against his chest. He got up. “Aren’t you a heavy idiot?” he whispered.

Then, he ran.

Out of the district, over the bridge across the Veil, whose waters were now pitch-black. Insomnia was covered in miasma and fallen, sleeping bodies. The city that never slept had turned into a ghost town where Haze, Baekhyun and him were the only living, moving men.

That was until he saw the masked man.

There was a figure, dressed in dark overalls, a grey thing that looked like a gas mask covering his whole face. He had been about to cross, but stopped in his tracks when he saw Chanyeol approaching. After a moment of silence, he gestured for him to come close.

And Chanyeol didn’t know if he was friend or foe, but he was tired and weak and he didn’t have anywhere else to go, so he took a step forward.

It was only when they were practically face to face that he recognized him.

Twelfth Act - Libera Me
Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda:
Quando cœli movendi sunt et terra.
Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem.

He had loved him, despite everything, in that terrible, tragic way. Baekhyun had known, right from the first time he had set eyes on his other half.

He had arrived to the place where he was being kept by pure chance - or maybe by destiny, because both of their souls were one thing and he had been drawn there. The room had been hidden in the upper floors of Haze’s mansion, in the wing of the house he had been told never to visit. It had been warded, made soundproof and protected behind a sealed door, and still he had found it almost by instinct, every miasma lock that Haze had placed dissolving as soon as his light power touched it.

After crossing the threshold, Baekhyun’s life had lost its meaning. Once he was at the other side of the door, he had learned to see by himself.

He had been told that every person had a reflection, and Haze had told him that his was ‘gone’. He had never wondered what that meant - his mind spun too quickly sometimes, and was too sloppy when he was about to sleep - but he would have never, ever, expected to find a boy with his face and empty eyes locked away in the attic.

He wore clothes too fine and too rumpled, sat on the bed in the middle of a room of black and blue silk that was starting to collect dust, a black-haired doll who was perfectly taken care of, but who had no one who would come to play with him.

Baekhyun thought he wouldn’t react, but the boy tilted his head up as soon as he turned around to go.

“He’s far too gone to be saved, you know?” he said. “He’s been too bad.”

In silence, Baekhyun had been doubting. He believed in the cause Haze whispered in his ear every night because it was so easy to do so, but he had been questioning himself at night, when his eyes were about to close. A painless world sounded like the perfect place, but why did he feel like he was causing suffering instead of avoiding it. When he stopped to think (when he could think) he didn’t see happy people after Haze’s wake. Only empty ones.

Haze had told him he had chosen him. Haze always seemed so proud of his powers, of his conviction, of the way he fought to follow their dreams. But Haze planned and he followed. Haze never let him go out alone. Haze told him that he loved him with something akin to desperation but he didn’t want Baekhyun to talk about his previous life on the other side. He had never told him he kept a boy with his same face hidden like a dark little secret, a pretty songbird in a golden cage he hadn’t wanted Baekhyun to find.

“You’re me,” he whispered, kneeling in front of the boy. He was black haired, dark eyed, unnaturally pale. He was so pretty and looked so dead. “Why does Haze keep you here? Why are you—”

“He could have been a good person. In another world. Not in this one, not in this one. Evil claimed him in this reality.”

“Hey,” Baekhyun whispered, holding one of his hands between his. They were cold, the skin of them starting to harden, nails polished like opaque glass. “Do you want to get out? Do you want me to take you out of this place? Haze’s not at home now, if you’re scared of him. He hurt you, right?”

“The city chose his mother. His mother chose to rule. His friends chose to fear him. The Blessed Order chose to hunt him. I chose to follow my duty. He chose to destroy. Perhaps Insomnia could have helped him instead of damning him. Or perhaps not. He turned me into no one but we can’t save everyone. That’s not what we are supposed to do. Should I have done something else? Should I have listened? Should I have killed him in his sleep so he wouldn’t have hurt my other half? Tell me, you.”

Baekhyun swallowed, hard. “He did this to you.”

“We can’t help but to destroy ourselves sometimes, but don’t ever love the things that’ll kill you.”

Baekhyun’s mind was clear, for the first time in months. It felt so strange to be faced with someone who wasn’t himself, but could have been. It was even stranger to realize that perhaps Haze had wanted them to be the same. He felt so cold, so sick, aware of his surroundings, like someone had suddenly woken him up from a pleasant dream by pushing him into cold water.

He was scared to death, more than he had ever been.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“Someone stop him,” the boy with his face said, voice impossibly soft, eyes still empty. “He must be stopped. He needs to be stopped. He’s in great pain. Help him. Help Insomnia. There’s no redemption. Save my world. Save us all. Save me.”

“But how can I… How am I supposed to save you?”

For the first time, the other Baekhyun looked at him. He had little cracks around his eyes, like chips on porcelain. His gaze was so dark that made him shiver. “No one,” he whispered. “No one wants to die.”

“I—”

“The town must be saved. The mirrors must be broken. Be our savior. Be Insomnia’s savior and let it live. Be my savior and kill me when I’m not needed anymore.”

—

Baekhyun tossed around, trying to break free, to let air in his lungs.

Kill me.

He had done that by placing the knife in a broken boy’s hand and closing the door behind him. Even though he knew what would become of him.

Be Insomnia’s savior.

He had accepted the burden, he had let Jongdae and Sehun open his chest, turn him into a magitec monstrosity so he could skip the judgement of the balance. He had remained alive, because Haze wasn’t dead.

No one wants to die.

And he didn’t want to be cracked. He didn’t want to be a crippled, mutilated thing, but as long as the generator was in him, his own magic would be accepted. He had learned to love Insomnia, and learned to love the light that pulsed within him, but he’d been forced to choose. Using his power at its full extent would made the generator go into overload and break. Calling his light, even if it was a tiny bit of it, would affect its performance, breaking it little by little.

He had a time bomb in his chest. He could choose the torture to go on slowly or to finish things with a blast.

At least it was a choice he got to make.

There was a blurred black mask above him. There was pain in his chest. Voices. If they took the generator off, the pain would be gone, but his mission would fail. He didn’t want the pain, but he needed it. He’d recover. He always recovered.

“Baekhyun? Baekhyun!” a voice called him. It was like Haze’s voice but it was not. Haze’s voice had the edge and the coldness of a blade; that one was so warm. So he smiled. He wanted to hold onto that. To live. Just another day so he could see— “He’s breathing! Hurry up!”

“The generator is broken and the skin in his chest is too cracked. Even if he had another one…” the mask said.

“We have another one! I’m telling you to put it in!”

He had cracks in his skin. He know what that meant. The balance was claiming him. It had finally reached his very core, after Baekhyun had sealed his fate by allowing his own reflection to be free. The other Baekhyun had wanted that, but never did.

“I—” he said. His throat was dry, words barely coming out. He had been running away from that - the white light at the end of the tunnel.

“He spoke!” not-Haze exclaimed. “He’s awake! Baekhyun!?”

He keeps calling for him, and that made him feel warm. He had asked him once, what it was what he wanted. What he really wanted.

If that was his last night on Earth, wouldn’t he ask for another day?

“Don’t let me…” he started. The mask was there, and a face. He couldn’t focus his gaze. His chest hurt. He was alive, if it pained him. “Please. Don’t let me die.”

The two voices were silent. There was an intake of breath, like someone was about to start crying. Baekhyun had always thought that no one would come to his funeral. Sehun, perhaps, but there was no trace of Sehun in the world.

“You heard him. Install it!” not-Haze said. “Install it!”

It was funny how different they were, and how his own reflection had been right, he thought. One reflection was too damaged, the kind that couldn’t be saved. The other was… Well. It was true that Park Chanyeol could have been a good person, in another world. Shaped by different choices.

“Hey,” he mumbled. “Hey. Have I ever told you that you’re like sunshine? After a Euphoria night.”

The world blurred. There were hands on his chest, warm and soft against hardened skin. Splintering was strange - you knew that the hard, cracked thing on your chest and hands and face was part of your body, but you couldn’t feel it as such. And so you didn’t want to see it, you didn’t want to touch it, because that couldn’t be you.

And still he felt the contact. He felt the hands around the metal of the generator above his still-beating heart.

“We spoke about this - I can try, but I don’t know if he’ll be strong enough to take it. You have to understand that his state is delicate,” the mask protested.

“What I understand is that he’ll die for sure if you do nothing!”

That’s right, Baekhyun thought. Don’t let me die. Let me stand by myself. Let me have another night on the face of Earth.

The hands on his chest hesitated, but gripped the metal in the end. Pulse firm, they twisted it, trying to pull the broken thing out.

He was almost gone, but he still parted his lips and screamed.

—

When he opened his eyes, his chest still hurt like hell.

There were bandages on his chest, he realized, draped tight over his skin. He moved his hand to touch them tentatively, pressing down on the covered skin only to find the shape of cracks beneath. He had more of them over his naked collarbone and going up his neck. They had gotten bigger, wider, and it felt strange to touch them, because he could feel his fingers on his body to a certain extent but not as he should: it was the same sensation as placing one’s hand over a layer of dead skin.

He had almost died, that time.

And still, he should be weak, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t exist for long, if the power of the magitec generator wasn’t keeping his body stable, and Haze had made sure of breaking it, and yet the metal cylinder over his heart felt warm and buzzed, and he could breathe, and sit up, and stand.

He had the distant memory of Chanyeol and a masked man speaking about him, but he couldn’t recall what they had said. He had woken up healthier than he’d thought he’d be but with his head spinning, alone and covered by a blanket in what looked like Jongdae’s old metro car - weapons piled up at the corners and walls empty after Chanyeol and him had turned the thing on to go meet Haze at his home.

“He is better like this than awake, I can assure you that,” a voice said then, strangely metallic echo to it. Baekhyun kept very still, surveying the room around him. He felt the absence of the hidden blades he always carried like he was missing one of his own limbs, and let out a short, relieved breath when he saw them laying on the seat opposite to the one where he had been sleeping. Silently, he moved towards them, quickly fastening them closed over his forearms. He had no sleeves to hide them under, but he’d still have the surprise element if he moved fast.

“Can’t we… tie him up or something?” another person said, and Baekhyun recognized the voice that time. Chanyeol. Frowning, he approached the train doors. “I know he has tried to get to the surface every time he’s been conscious, but—”

The first thing Baekhyun saw when he looked out from the train doors was Chanyeol, with his back to him. The next one was a man in a grey, old fashioned suit with his face covered by a big, gas-like mask. It made him look like a fly; a menacing one, looming over the fallen body of the third person in the platform: an unconscious boy, tied up on the floor.

Baekhyun didn’t need to see his face to realize it was Sehun.

Why is he—

He didn’t have time to move, or to attack, or to say anything even, because, in front of him, Chanyeol froze and turned around. His eyes were big and round when he looked at him in the face.

“Baekhyun,” he whispered, and the boy felt his stomach churn at the weight of the word. Chanyeol had dark circles under his eyes and the most scared expression Baekhyun had seen him sport ever.

“I’m okay,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to add. He had no shirt on, no eyepatch: he knew exactly what Chanyeol was seeing when he looked at him.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping? You almost— I only left you alone for half an hour, oh my god. Why are you awake and carrying weapons?”

“I always carry weapons,” said Baekhyun, simply.

“There is no need to worry, Mr. Park. Jongdae mentioned that his body would stabilize soon if it accepted the new generator. It seems like he was correct. I doubt that it takes more than a day for him to be at his usual capabilities.”

Chanyeol was soon on him, one hand of his shoulder, eyes dark and fixed on the blades over his wrists. Baekhyun allowed himself to lean onto him, if only a bit, but didn’t allow the warmth to distract him from the masked man. “Yixing?” he asked. “What are you wearing?”

“Jongdae’s invention. It filters the miasma, or at least part of it. As far as I know, it is not a definite solution, but it helps us resist the outbreak of Euphoria Syndrome.”

“Weren’t you…? Wasn’t Haze controlling you?”

“He changed tactics,” a different, metallic voice said, at the same moment a figure in black laborer’s clothes entered into the ruined train platform. He was also spotting a mask, but Baekhyun didn’t need to see his face to recognize him.

“Jongdae,” he called.

“I see you’re already recovering. Don’t force it, will you?”

“As I would,” replied Baekhyun with a smirk.

“I am serious, Byun. It was a miracle that your body didn’t reject what we installed on you. The skin in your chest is too splintered for a magitec generator to work well for long. Do you understand?”

Chanyeol squeezed his shoulder. Baekhyun didn’t feel like looking at him. “I’m here on borrowed time, right? What’s new about it?” He shrugged, body so used to deceit that the movement looked perfectly natural. “I’m thankful for your concern, but what do you mean Haze has changed tactics? He had half of the city under his control last time I was conscious enough to know.”

“That was two days ago,” replied Jongdae. “He brought people to him in the South District and infected them with Euphoria. Then he sent them back, right after you ran away and I found you.”

“He made them splinter and set them free all across Insomnia. I assume the Exalted is not directly controlling them anymore, but they are contagious,” added Yixing. “In his imprudence, that man has created the biggest outbreak of the sickness since it first came into existence.”

Right behind Baekhyun, Chanyeol clicked his tongue. “I don’t think Haze has made this out of imprudence. He needs energy, and the infected are his: he’ll take it from them and open wide the door between worlds.”

“The simple concept of it is foolish.”

“But it can be done. And he will. Open the gate, steal the energy in Baekhyun’s and my world and break the bond before the consequences of his actions over the balance destroy Insomnia as well.”

Finally, Baekhyun left Chanyeol’s side, going to the fallen figure of Sehun on the floor. Someone had tied the boy up and covered his face with another black mask, but he still was unconscious, as still as he had been when he was under Haze’s orders. “He didn’t recover when he was released from Soul Magic control, right?” he asked, kneeling on the dirty floor. He was sure that Haze had searched for that boy in the cobweb of souls in town. He knew what things Baekhyun cared for, and he had always done his best to take them away. “What’s wrong with him?”

“There’s not as much miasma down here as there is on the surface, but he still absorbs it and produces it. We put the mask on him as a means to slow down the process, but he still is—”

“Infected.” The word had the taste of poison in Baekhyun’s mind. “So I take the city is covered by miasma. What happened with the people?”

“Most of them are sick. I don’t know about the outskirts, but the main streets are full of laughing ghosts,” explained Jongdae with a sigh. “Some people hid on the old metro stations. I saw some of them this morning: they aren’t infected yet, but it won’t be long until the miasma comes underground. This battle is lost.”

“What about the marshal?”

“She’s invulnerable herself, but her army isn’t. Wasn’t. She mobilized her troops to stop people from going out, but her soldiers were on the street when the waves of miasma came. Last thing I know, she urgently left for Prosperity. Probably to request help, but…”

“And the Blessed Order?”

“Barricaded themselves underground. I went to see Do Kyungsoo myself while you recovered, but they have closed the gates.”

Baekhyun clicked his tongue. “So there they are, doing what they always did best. It’s so easy to love them sometimes.”

“They will be the ones to remain when everything else has fallen, but what purpose does that serve?” said Yixing, shaking his head. “And to think me and them were allies years ago.”

“There’s no point worrying about that,” stated Baekhyun. “Let’s move onto the important stuff. What is Haze doing?”

“He’s at home,” Jongdae replied. “He hasn’t gone out yet. That’s where he got all those… mirrors Chanyeol talked about, so it makes sense. His mansion is his sanctuary.”

“He’s charging himself up. Concentrating all the energy he needs in his mirrors,” added Chanyeol, face unusually stern. “I can hear the glasses vibrate. I’ve been doing it for quite some time. He’s not done but… He’ll be. Soon. And after that, well…”

Baekhyun placed a hand on Sehun’s chest. It was going up and down, up and down, like the boy was merely sleeping and not knocked unconscious. Less than a week ago, he had been okay. Less than a week ago, everything had been bad, but not as much. He wasn’t the type to allow himself to be hopeful, but he had seen some semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. “What now?” he asked. “Any ideas?”

Yixing’s gaze dropped to his feet. “I am afraid I don’t know what to do.”

“I just told you: we tried our best but this battle is lost,” added Jongdae. He sounded positively angry, but it was the kind of anger of the one who had tried and tried to give and hadn’t gotten a thing in return. “I did what I could, Byun: I fixed your body again to the best of my possibilities, but we’ve got four men and he has an entire city. We are relatively safe now, but for how long? The miasma will come down here and the moment there is too much in the air not even these masks will protect us.”

“Then what?” Baekhyun asked. He was so furious too - angry and sad and frustrated. He had fought so hard; he had given up his body, his soul and his world, and after Chanyeol had arrived everything had been going so well. He had thought they would be able to win. For a moment, he had believed in it, and he refused to let the idea go. He wasn’t ready for that. “Do we sit here and wait for our death?”

“We could run,” suggested Jongdae. “Like the marshal did. To the Prosperan Empire. Perhaps the Empress could help.”

“And surrender Insomnia?“

“Insomnia’s already lost.”

Chanyeol cleared his throat. “And what if we break the mirrors?”

All of the heads turned towards him. “What?” Jongdae snapped.

“If I got all this right, the miasma and sickness started as a consequence of the balance being broken, and it’s been getting worse because Haze has been messing with said balance more and more. So if we fixed the balance, or if we broke it completely, wouldn’t the two worlds stop influencing one another? And wouldn’t that mean the miasma and Euphoria Syndrome would stop?”

“It probably would, but you are one man,” conceded Yixing after a second of long, tense silence. “We discussed this before: a great quantity of energy is required to achieve something like that. It is not a simple feat, Mr. Park.”

Chanyeol shook his head. “No, listen to me. Haze has been collecting energy. That’s why he’s doing all this now. He almost has it.”

Baekhyun gasped, looking at the other boy with his eyes wide open.

“Haze has energy, not you,” Jongdae scoffed. “I know you two are reflections, but I don’t believe you have a common pool of strength, exactly?”

“No,” replied Chanyeol. “Of course not. But Yixing said this before and he’s right: Haze’s power peak comes from having as many active mirrors as possible. Mine happens the moment those mirrors break. Not when they are intact, not when they are broken, but in the exact second they crack. I won’t be strong enough before, and my body will be unstable and weak after, but in that specific moment I’ll be at the top of the wave.”

“So you’ll be able to command that energy?”

“I’ll try.”

“Because of course the Exalted will let you. He’s too powerful now: he’ll give you the beating of your life before you can do anything of the sort.”

Baekhyun stood up. “Not if I’m there to stop him.”

Jongdae frowned at him. Yixing averted his gaze. Chanyeol swore - not on the stars, he never swore to the stars - and ran to him, tilting his head up so Baekhyun would have to look at him. “If you plan on using your power—” he started.

“Light magic is the best thing against miasma,” Baekhyun replied with a sigh. “You’ve seen that.”

“But if you unleash that power…”

“The generator in my chest will break. I know that, but so what? You’ve heard Jongdae: my chest is more splintered than not already, and look at my face - I have one blue eye and cracks all around it. That doesn’t sound very healthy anyway, now does it? The corruption has gone that far in me, so what do I do, then? Do I hide underground, close my eyes and wait for the unavoidable or do I fight?”

Chanyeol stared at him for one long moment, and Baekhyun wondered if he was hearing something else, listening to that song only he could hear. Would he be able to hear something, over the noise of Haze’s mirrors, or was he only looking? Baekhyun was afraid to know, but at least his secrets were now in his face for everyone to see - the big ones, at least. The other boy smiled at him, sad. “You do fight, of course.”

“You get the mirrors, I get your evil twin.”

At their side, Jongdae huffed. “That’s all pretty cute, but you still don’t know if it’ll work. Maybe you’ll make the Exalted more powerful. Maybe you’ll make half of Insomnia explode if you try to… separate the worlds, or whatever it is you are hoping to achieve, and I don’t want to get caught in the blast.”

“Why are you so negative?” Chanyeol protested.

“It’s called realistic.”

Baekhyun stared at the fallen Sehun for a moment. He switched his gaze to the silent tunnels, then, and to the darkness beyond. He nodded to himself, clenching his hands. That was the only way, he knew that much. “Jongdae, Yixing,” he called. “I need you two to go.”

Yixing turned towards him. “Baekhyun?”

“Carry Sehun and leave. Use the metro tunnels and get out of town. Get to Prosperity and tell the Empress about the mirrors Haze keeps here. Perhaps she will be… willing to send troops to break them if Chanyeol and I fail. It’s the only plan I can think of. We’ll give you time to leave. How many hours can we spare?”

“Haze’s mirrors keep charging,” Chanyeol said after a moment. “So I don’t know. They’ll be ready in half a day? Maybe less?”

Baekhyun nodded. “Seven hours. You have seven hours to escape. Then we’ll go for Haze. Is that okay with you?”

Yixing looked torn, eyes traveling from Baekhyun to Jongdae under the sockets of his gas mask. “You have to be careful. That all sounds like a call for suicide.”

Among all things, Baekhyun had the actual nerve to laugh. “Maybe. But no one wants to die, you know? So if I have to go, at least I’ll do it by punching the Reaper in the face.”

—

They had been left alone, and the old metro car was silent. Too quiet for Baekhyun’s last night in Insomnia City. A place that never, ever slept - just like him.

There were no mirrors in that town, he had personally seen to that, but if he looked hard enough he could see his reflection in the darkened glasses of the train window: a boy with mismatched eyes and cracks in his face, who would be facing his last battle in a matter of hours.

“Shouldn’t you sleep?” a voice asked next to him.

Baekhyun would almost have laughed. Like he could sleep at a time like that, with Haze shrouding Insomnia in poison and the generator humming in his chest. Like any of them could, in fact. But the thing with Chanyeol was that he always was so soft.

“Huh-huh, not really. I want to enjoy this, you know?”

“This what, exactly?”

“This moment.”

“The suffocating wait at Insomnia’s dark depths?” Chanyeol was smiling too, when Baekhyun turned to look at him. He stretched his hand towards him, as if to playfully hit Baekhyun in the shoulder, but he stopped himself before there was any semblance of contact.

It seemed like a century ago when that boy had arrived at Insomnia and he had thought it was a terrible chore, having to feign sympathy towards him. He had never considered placing being a good person at the top of his list of priorities, but he realized that there had been many occasions when he hadn’t been exactly nice to Chanyeol in those last weeks.

There was only one thing that had been asked of him.

“I… No, not that,” he replied, and he found himself laughing out loud, a bit nostalgically. “It’s just that I’ve been in Insomnia for years now, and despite everything I’ve loved this city. And now things are gonna be over, and I don’t know how that’ll go for me but it’s kind of like the end of an era. A very important one.”

Chanyeol nodded, slowly. He looked scared, and twitchy, even though he was trying so obviously and hard to sit still. “Finally the big boss fight, huh?”

“Either we win or the city falls, yeah. So you know, no pressure.”

“No pressure, no. Which reminds me that, by the way, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be facing my final boss battle without a proper weapon. Maybe I should have told you before Jongdae and the others left, but it slipped my mind.”

“What happened to your guitar?”

“We had to take the generator out.”

Baekhyun closed his eyes, leaning his head on the cold window behind him. “Ah.”

“I still have my song, though. The guitar helped me when it came to making it louder, but it was me who listened all the time. That hasn’t changed.”

“You’ll be fine. You always are.”

“You think so?”

All his life, Baekhyun had smiled a lot to try to make himself believe that he wasn’t lonely. He was glad he had reached the moment when he wasn’t anymore, but he didn’t exactly know what facial expression went with that.

How in the world was someone honest? He had always felt that it was easier to change reality than to stare at it in the face.

“You know what?” Chanyeol said then, his voice so pleasant over the silence. “There was a long time in my life when I thought I was the unluckiest man in the world. I always got the units I hadn’t studied in exams, decided to wait in the longest supermarket line, never bought raffle tickets when it hit for my friends… Stuff like that.”

The world was ending, but that boy always rambled when he was nervous. Baekhyun smiled to himself, and for once he didn’t try to hide it. Those were the perks of the apocalypse. “Had you ever thought that you were maybe causing it, to an extent? You’re a Soul Mage, and a powerful one at that. So maybe you believed in your own unluckiness so much that you were influencing people around you without realizing or something. That would be… interesting.”

“It was bad enough with me not causing it, shut up!” When Baekhyun looked at him, Chanyeol’s eyes were so comically open that he had to laugh. Oh, he really wanted to kiss him so much, and he didn’t know if he was allowed.

“Consider it.”

“No way!” Chanyeol took a deep breath. “But anyway. What I wanted to say with all this was that I felt unlucky most of the time, and that also part of me was scared because I thought that the music I heard was some kind of sign of me being as sick as my mother was but… I also felt blessed, deep down. Because I had that sound in me and it made sense. Because that maybe meant I was a genius, you know? I had that music, and it was mine, and no one would ever take it away from me.”

“I don’t know if this is what you want me to say, but you were right about having a special talent.”

“Yeah. Soul Melody. Murder Melody. Haze said it could be either.”

“And which one is it?”

“None? Or one of them? Both? The music is too loud, and always the same. It depends on how I face the pull.”

Baekhyun nodded as Chanyeol fell into comfortable silence. He parted his lips and he closed them, then parted them again. “I understand the struggle,” he admitted. “There were many things that I wanted when Haze came for me. To run away. To start again. To rule the world. To be gone. The worst part for me, when I thought about it all after, was that I did many things and never truly knew what part was manipulation and what part I really wanted to do. That and that I crossed the mirror and never said goodbye. I wonder how my family is. Will their reflections also be involved in this mess?”

Baekhyun had had a house, and a mother, a father, a brother and a dog. They didn’t live in a city of black steel and glass, but he wished he could see the metropolis at the other side of the looking glass one more time. A farewell gift.

“You should go visit them, if you miss them, once we’re back.”

“You should go, on my behalf. I’ll write the address down for you if Jongdae has paper here. Tell them their son misses their Thursday movie nights, and their amusement park tours in summer.”

That time, Chanyeol did touch him, closing his fingers around Baekhyun’s arm, turning him around to face him. He looked dead serious, and scared, and sad. He was always so lovely. “We can go together,” he affirmed, like he was so certain.

“I have a ticking bomb in my chest, Chanyeol.”

The other boy’s eyes went from his eyes to his neck, traveling along the lines of cracks until he lost them beneath the collar of his shirt. “I thought you were planning to make it explode,” he said. “That’ll take any traces of magitec off your body. Once the generator’s gone, you can cross, Baekhyun.”

Will I last that long? Baekhyun thought. He didn’t say it. “I have to end Haze.”

“I know that. And don’t you dare to hold back. But after that…”

After. “How can you be such an optimist about all this?”

“I am not. I am just hopeful. Because someone has to, remember?”

Baekhyun felt something inside of him break. Only to be reforged anew, cracks mended with gold.

“So you’re the hopeful one. Then who am I?” he whispered. What do you hear when you listen to my song?

Chanyeol’s smile was the brightest thing he had ever seen. “You’re obviously the warrior,” he replied. “So you know, Byun, wear your scars with pride.”

At first, Baekhyun said nothing. Then he leaned forward and kissed him.

That has happened one time before and he had screwed up and Chanyeol had rejected him, and he didn’t know if he was allowed to do that, or supposed to do it when the world was ending, but Chanyeol had asked him what he wanted once, and he wanted that so much that he felt like dying.

He was half expecting the other boy to push him away, but every protest in his own head went silent when Chanyeol actually kissed him back, letting his mouth fall open and dragging him atop of him on the old train seat until Baekhyun was straddling him, thighs at the sides of his hips. He moaned when Baekhyun bit his lip, all low and raw and needy, and the boy felt the sound of it resonate in his blood, setting his hair on edge and his skin on fire.

“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol called him, a plea, when they broke apart to breathe. And Baekhyun was relishing in that: the hotness of skin on skin, the breathless pant on his lips, the taste of saliva and the want. He had forgotten and needed to remember. He wanted Chanyeol to feel good.

He placed a finger on his lips when the other boy went to speak. “I told you once there were things I was keeping for myself,” he whispered, so close to his lips that they were almost kissing again. “I hid which world I was from. I hid that my reflection was dead and that I was dying. But.” He closed his eyes when Chanyeol tried to speak. “There was another thing.”

“What?”

“You.” That time, Baekhyun kissed him, pressing against him when Chanyeol’s hands went from his face to his shoulders to his waist to his ass. He whimpered, head reeling, hiding his face hidden in Chanyeol’s neck. “You told me you wanted me to go back with you and I want to. I am not supposed to but I do. That world, the other side, I really—”

“Then don’t die on me, Byun,” Chanyeol cut him, half an order and half a prayer. He kept him steady with one hand, the other one traveling to his face when Baekhyun moved back to stare at him.

“I’ll try?” he replied with a short laugh that died in his mouth when the tip of Chanyeol’s finger grazed the biggest crack on his cheek. His skin was dead here, insensitive, but he felt the touch deep down, in the pulsing flesh beneath. There was a pull in him, in his heart and in his stomach and in the blood of his veins that brought him towards Chanyeol like a magnet. Haze’s had cold eyes of the sharp black of Insomnian glass, but Chanyeol’s were brown and warm like the autumn back at home. He sucked in a shaky breath when the boy went to kiss him along the crack, from his cheek to his jaw to his neck. He had to bite his lip not to scream when Chanyeol bit on the tender skin of his non-deformed collarbone.

He squirmed, hands going to the buttons on his own shirt, unfastening them so fast he almost ripped one off. He wanted his clothes to be gone, before he could think about it. Besides Jongdae, he hadn’t let no one seen him since the first time he had gotten a generator installed. It had been his shame and his cross to bear, but he was tired, and hard, and more awake than ever, and if the end of the world was coming, he wanted to face it with no regrets.

“Is that okay?” Chanyeol asked. He was staring at the bandages is chest. “You were about to die days ago, maybe we shouldn’t—”

“I am high on magitec. And I break easily, but I recover faster. I am okay, more than okay. You are not going to kill me with pre-apocalyptic sex. Okay?”

“Okay.” Chanyeol breathed in as Baekhyun’s shirt fell from his shoulders. He held the boy’s right hand, turning it around until the clasps that tied the hidden blades to his forearm were in sight, and Baekhyun felt the sudden urge to press his arm to his chest, to run away from the intimacy of the gesture and remain dressed, concealed.

Only, he didn’t want to.

He felt so dizzy when one of the blades hit the metallic floor, and so light when the second one joined it. Chanyeol was staring at him, pupils blown and breath ragged on his lips. He hadn’t been touched, yet.

“You’re really so beautiful, you know?” Baekhyun muttered, because he couldn’t think of a truer thing to say in that moment.

Chanyeol carried him up, until they both were standing. “Take that off,” he said, the smallest hint of command in his voice, hands already on the button of his pants. Baekhyun’s whole body reacted, tension was giving to electricity and insecurity to something close to desperation as he went to practically rip Chanyeol’s shirt off, buttons flying everywhere when he pulled it open. Chanyeol grunted something intelligible as he threw him back onto the seat, parting his lips when they met Baekhyun’s and sucking his tongue into his mouth.

The pressure in Baekhyun’s chest grew so much that it threatened to crush him. He dug his nails into Chanyeol’s back, so deep that he was sure he was going to drawn blood, and he didn’t care because Chanyeol was moaning and Baekhyun wanted him to make that sound again, all needy and wrecked. He wanted Chanyeol to kiss him, just like that, lips going down from his mouth to his neck and his chest, over the bandages and on the unmarked skin below, as he sucked on the dips between his lower ribs. His heart was drumming in this chest like a caged bird, flapping his wings as it tried to break free.

Because that, he thought as Chanyeol kneeled between his spread legs, was only a heartbeat of what could have been if both of them had stayed at the other side of the mirror. Two boys who would have met each other at university, or in the street. The kind of boys who had an eternity and not a countdown. The kind of boys who wouldn’t ever have to say goodbye if it wasn’t by choice.

He bit back tears as Chanyeol sucked on the skin of his inner thigh. He screamed and arched his back on the slippery leather of the train seat when the boy took him into his mouth.

“Oh, stars, fuck,” he muttered. He was so overwhelmed, he felt so good, last strands of control flying away in a wave of red and white as he was taken whole. There was hands on his hips, keeping him in place as Chanyeol hollowed his cheeks and flattened his tongue, and Baekhyun realized that he had been thrusting, all messy and arrhythmic and out of control. He was so close to the edge and he wanted a free fall. He wanted it to last. He shuddered, eyes closed and nails digging crescents in Chanyeol’s scalp as he tried to find purchase. “Wait, I’m gonna—” he whispered.

Chanyeol let go of him only the second it took him to speak. “Then do,” he said, and he sounded so certain and so breathless, and he was looking straight at him when Baekhyun opened his eyes, and so he tilted his head back and orgasmed as soon as Chanyeol took him again, so fast and so sudden, dissolving his conscience into a wave of white.

When he came down from his high, he already felt the soreness in his throat and the cold of the lack of hands on his skin. He shuddered, fighting to focus his vision, and the first thing he saw was Chanyeol’s shit-eating grin as he cleaned the corner of his mouth with his thumb.

“Did you just…?” Baekhyun asked, and Chanyeol simply shrugged. “Oh god, come here.”

Chanyeol did, and the urgency should have been gone, but the clock kept ticking and dawn was closer than it should be. “Do you realize you’re switching deities when you swear?”

“Stars, shut up,” he replied. He could taste himself in Chanyeol’s mouth, and the thought of it, and the warmth of the hands on his skin were making the pressure come back. Chanyeol’s cock was hard and heavy against his thigh, even through the fabric of the pants that he was still wearing, and he felt dizzy all over. “I want to ride you.”

Chanyeol’s pupils were blown wide when he stared down at him. “Fuck,” he growled, frowning right after. “Baekhyun, that’s not— There’s no lube here, you can’t—”

“I’m okay and I want to. It’s fine.”

“But if it’s gonna hurt you, I—”

“We don’t need it, I can take it.” Baekhyun smiled, tracing the shape of Chanyeol’s lips with his thumb. If he could have a last wish that night, and if he were only to choose things that were at the reach of his hand, he would beg to have that. “I can just get you off if you don’t want me, but…”

“Of course I want you,” Chanyeol replied, and he sounded so certain that the mere words let him all breathless. “What I don’t want is for you to be in pain because of this.”

“Please.”

The fight went partially out of Chanyeol’s eyes as he leaned down to kiss him. “Are you really sure?” he asked against his lips, in a question that died in a whimper when Baekhyun slipped one hand inside his pants. He was so hot, and so sensitive and Baekhyun felt so ridiculously happy.

“Off with these,” he whispered after a moment, tugging at Chanyeol’s pants. “And sit down, will you?”

Baekhyun decided he liked straddling Chanyeol. He loved to have him looking up at him instead of how it usually was, loved the expression on his face as he stared at him, flushed and breathless. It felt like control without control, like riding a wave and let it pull him under all the same, lips on lips and skin on skin. Chanyeol’s hands were so warm, so he smiled when he held one of them and took it to his mouth.

“You do it?” he asked, parting his lips and giving the tip of a finger a small, kittenish lick. He felt Chanyeol’s dick twitching under him, and his grin grew into a full smirk. “So you have a finger-in-mouth kink, ah?”

He had just been teasing, but the moan that came out Chanyeol’s mouth when he said it was so roughly desperate that he felt all of the nerves in his body burn. He needed that, for Chanyeol to do it again, for him to lose his mind until he could not think about anything else that wasn’t them and now, so he stared at him in the eye as he went down on his fingers, curling his tongue around them and coating them with saliva until they were all wet, and slick, and Chanyeol looked all flush under him.

“Now in me,” Baekhyun whispered, kissing him again, just because he was allowed.

It hurt, and he knew it was going to, but he almost welcomed the pain as the first finger breached his rim. He leaned forward, nails digging in Chanyeol’s shoulders, face hidden in the crook of his neck. He whimpered and bit the skin, hard, as his body relaxed and started opening and his heart burned in his chest. He had wanted that so much and he was getting it, and nothing else existed in the world except that moment in the semi-darkness, and Chanyeol’s fingers in him.

“Hurry,” he urged, groaning out loud when Chanyeol literally tsk-ed in his ear at the haste. “Hurry up.”

“Impatient, are we? I’ll take note of that, for other… occasions.”

He timed that last word with a press in a spot somewhere inside him, and Baekhyun arched his back with a scream. Everything burned so much that his own vision was fading in a cloud of red and white, pleasure and need and pain together in one giant knot in his chest, about to be unleashed. He had three fingers inside him but he still felt so empty.

“Get in me now.”

“Not yet.” Chanyeol’s fingers stayed where they were, scissoring him open until his body gave in and he was wrecked and hard and so oversensitive that he thought he would come for a second time. He complained with a whimper when he felt the other boy withdraw, and the need he had for that was way too much, so he got into position a little too fast, thighs shaking and Chanyeol’s hand steadying him in place before he went down.

“Oh, fuck,” Chanyeol groaned under him, voice so unguarded and so raw, but Baekhyun could barely hear him. He had gone too fast, and it hurt so much he thought he had managed to split himself into two, and he didn’t realize he was shaking all over until he felt Chanyeol keeping him in place. “Slow now.”

He was going to cry. He felt that he wouldn’t be blamed if he did. He had bottomed out and Chanyeol was kissing his face, so he perhaps was, after all.

“Impatient and stubborn,” Chanyeol murmured, almost to himself. The pain had eased into a dull burn, so Baekhyun tentatively moved his hips, grinning through his own panting breaths when the other boy moaned, so loud, and the first waves of pleasure and pain hit him. Chanyeol pulled him close to kiss him, open mouthed and desperate, as they picked up the pace, and the pain was gone, and Baekhyun felt so good, and he wanted it faster, and hotter, and now. His nails found skin again, sinking in and leaving parallel red trails. If Chanyeol was going back - and he was going back - it was going to be with Baekhyun’s nails and lips and breath imprinted on his skin. So he would remember him, feel him in his body, until every mark finally faded and the dream was gone.

He drew back a bit, cracks slightly golden on his skin because he wanted Chanyeol to see them. He did, and he moved forward to kiss him with such fervor that they suddenly lost their balance, and Baekhyun found himself with his back to the metal floor. It should have been cold, but he couldn’t feel it. Instead of that, he was too hot, and too happy, and Chanyeol was out of him and that couldn’t be because he was so impatient as well, so he reached out.

Chanyeol was all over him, and he stared down at his face. He was a total mess, of the good kind. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Baekhyun could barely find his voice, but he still laughed. And he meant it. “So alive. I feel so alive.”

His lips parted in a silent scream when he was filled once more.

And Baekhyun had always liked his sex rough and hard, the kind that was fast and left him sore and satisfied and with no space in his mind to think, but that time he was fully awake, all of his nerves ablaze beneath his skin, caught in a moment that felt like an overwhelming, different kind of intense.

He wanted that memory, that one, when the morning brought the end of the world, and so he dug his fingers into Chanyeol’s black hair, tried to find a purchase on his shoulders and back and circled his waist with his legs, calling his name with a voiceless cadence over and over, and too far gone to listen to the things Chanyeol was murmuring in his ear. It was so hard to breathe, sensation so strong, the whole weight of his burdens replaced by a feeling so warm he wanted to cry out.

He did, choking between a moan and a sob when Chanyeol reached between them and wrapped his fingers around his cock.

Their rhythm had faltered, an erratic mess, but it didn’t matter, he didn’t care. Baekhyun tilted his hips up higher at the same time Chanyeol caught his gaze. Close, he thought. Chanyeol stared down at him, cheeks flushed and eyes dark. “I’m taking you home,” he murmured.

And it was so simple and so warm, and the pressure was so crushing that Baekhyun felt himself reaching the edge, toppling it with such force that his back arched against Chanyeol and his vision whited out. He was being fucked through it all, so hard, after Chanyeol orgasmed too, still inside him, and Baekhyun shuddered, brain reeling.

He wanted that.

It was already done, but he wanted it still.

He wanted it.

He wanted to go home.

He didn’t want to die.

—

He tried to stay awake, even hours later, as Chanyeol sleepily traced the shape of the cracks on his skin with his fingers. It felt… nice, actually, and he smiled even though he knew the other boy had his eyes closed. He had been drifting on and off of sleep for the last hours, with his head on Baekhyun’s shoulder and his other hand around his waist.

For years, before he came to Insomnia he had been waiting for someone to save him, and after that, when he had learned to fight for himself he had covered his scars, because they were the visible signs of wounds he didn’t want others to see.

His battles were his to win, and he was about to march for war, and for the first time, he wasn’t afraid to let them show. No one would save him, but he didn’t need them to. The only thing he wanted was a hand to take him home, and a world who would welcome a boy who had mended his own cracks, not in black and white but with golden light.

Thirteenth Act - In Paradisum
In paradisum deducant te Angeli:
in tuo adventu suscipiant te Martyres,
et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.

The whole of Insomnia was immobile and grey, buzzing with a low, electric hum that was making Chanyeol’s hair stay on end. They saw people as they walked, across the bridge over Veil river and into the Southern District, splintered ghosts walking through grey clouds of miasma, some laughing, some gazing at them with empty eyes as they passed, some leaning against the walls like broken things.

It’s all because of Haze’s magic and his way of disturbing the balance, Chanyeol tried to remind himself. Put an end to what your reflection is doing, break the bond between our two worlds and the miasma will go and they’ll be okay.

All of them would. Even Baekhyun, who was not a soulless puppet like the other infected but was still sick in his own way and dying.

“I will go all out,” he had told him while he buttoned his shirt that morning. He didn’t look all proper anymore now that he didn’t have anything else to hide, and he stared at Chanyeol right in the face with those wild, mismatched eyes of his. “I will unleash all the power I have from the very beginning. I will keep him busy, I’ll fight: the mirrors are all yours. Do what you have to.”

Chanyeol was aware that, no matter how confident he seemed, Baekhyun was ready for a sacrifice. He trusted Chanyeol’s strength, even when it came to a task as big as chain-breaking a full room full of mirrors, weaponless, and separating the Soulstreams of two worlds. He hadn’t realized yet that, if one of them was going to burn out and be consumed, it would probably be Chanyeol and not him.

“We’ll both do.”

The buzz at Haze’s white manor was so loud that Chanyeol thought that his head was going to explode. The music still resounded below, however, and focusing on it helped him to advance with his head high across the dead gardens and empty corridors. There was no party inside of the house that time, no dancers on the floor nor music on the stage: there was only the man himself, with their back to them, and resting his hands on the railing of the balcony of his mirror room. His personal garden was below, a cemetery of rotten trees around the circle of the lake where he and the Insomnian reflection of Baekhyun had trained and kissed and fought to death. Haze’s back looked too white over the colorless landscape - a king among the ruins of his fallen empire.

“So you’ve come,” he said, without turning around to look at them. The buzzing sound was coming from the mirrors in the room, all of them vibrating in unison, but his voice was so clearly hearable over them, like it was one with the noise. “I thought I wouldn’t see you again after you ran away. And ah, that didn’t sound like fun.”

“We didn’t run,” Baekhyun replied. Haze chuckled and slowly, finally faced them, amused little smirk in his mouth as he finally stared over at them.

“Baekhyunnie, look at your skin. Haven’t you been overworking yourself too much lately, little boy?”

“Why? Are you concerned about me?”

“About you? You’re quite the sweet mistake, but not really. However, I wanted you to see it. This. What I can achieve.”

“Turning a beautiful city into a zombie playground? If that’s what you were going for, congratulations.”

Haze sighed and walked into the room from the balcony, the long tails of his coat floating around his legs as he moved. His steps were eerily silent on the marble floor, but all of his being was surrounded by noise. It connected him to the mirrors, Chanyeol realized - there were invisible, buzzing threads, from the looking glasses to Haze, like a giant cobweb with him at the center.

He’s almost ready.

“You know what was always wrong about you? Stars know I tried to shape you so you would understand, but your mind was always too… simple. My Baekhyun was conditioned from birth to believe in what the Blessed Order taught him, which ended in him choosing them over me, but you? Your mind was clean when I brought you here. And still you chose to deny me and to die for it. You were offered a chance to change the world and you rejected it. Even though you understood what it meant to be in pain.”

“And just because I understood it it had to mean that I didn’t want it?” Baekhyun’s hands pulsed in gold, once, and Chanyeol knew he had to be prepared. He had a task to do, and it started by cutting Haze from the threads that were feeding him energy, but he didn’t know what to do besides that. Help me, he begged to his song. Help me with this. “My feelings are a part of me. They are a part of everyone! Aren’t you seeing what happens when you take them by force?”

“The city is as it is because my method is imperfect. As soon as I have the energy I lack, every person will be correctly fixed. And they will thank me, as their savior. They will sing anthems in my honor: Lord Haze, the chosen who vanquished all suffering.”

Baekhyun clenched his fingers at his sides. “Has someone ever told you that you’re very wrong in the head?”

“Your vision, my boy, is too narrow. But not only yours, I’m afraid. Of course, you came together with my dearest reflection. How disappointing you are, for someone who has the same soul as I do.”

“I could say the same thing,” groaned Chanyeol through clenched teeth.

“You should have let me in when you could,” Haze continued. “And even after that, you could have chosen to return to the place where you belong and waited for your death among your loved ones. But alas, you are here instead. An spectator to my long-awaited finale: the final act of a requiem, and a genesis. You will be the first to see - and oh, how much better all this things get when you have an attentive public to watch.”

“Do you know what is the worst part of this all?” Chanyeol said. Baekhyun’s hands were pulsing again, light climbing through his arms, steadily turning his skin into shining gold. “That every time you speak, you sound like an egocentric megalomaniac, and that is cringey as hell.”

“The world is mine,” Haze stated.

Baekhyun let the light engulf his own body and threw himself at him with a scream.

His hidden blades were out, protruding from his sleeves and shining, surrounded by what looked like solidified light. The edges gleamed, sharp enough to cut diamond into dust, Haze didn’t even move an inch when he saw him coming close. He stood where he was, back straight and lips still curved in his ever-present smirk as the weapons collided against some kind of invisible and solid force, the force of the impact throwing Baekhyun back through the air.

“What—” The boy managed to land on his two feet, breathing heavily. Haze used to have a shield before, the one he had shared with Chanyeol and had burned everyone who wanted to hurt him, but that was a different thing entirely.

Chanyeol narrowed his eyes. It couldn’t be. “It’s the noise.”

Baekhyun looked back at him. “He’s using the noise to cover himself?!”

“Ah, with this amount of energy I can do much more than that.”

Haze snapped his fingers and Baekhyun fell to the ground with a scream. Chanyeol gasped and ran to him, but before he could have taken half a dozen of steps, the boy’s body moved, as grotesquely as a puppet under strings. Feeling a small rush of panic, he raised his eyes to Baekhyun’s face, but he found shock and fear instead of emptiness . It was then when he sensed them: the threads of noise, not in his mind, but around Baekhyun’s arms and legs, buzzing as they sucked his light in.

Chanyeol couldn’t see them exactly, but he felt them, and so he close his eyes trying to command them to break. The noise was definitely not his to control, however, and Haze laughed before the threads wrapped like vines around his arms and legs as well, making him raise his hands up in the air, defenseless.

“Thank the kind people of Insomnia,” Haze purred, and when Chanyeol opened his eyes, he saw him whispering the words in Baekhyun’s ears. The boy was struggling, skin lit and magitec generator already so hot that it was starting to burn through his shirt, dissolving the miasma that came out Haze’s mouth and fingers and skin.

Chanyeol knew that the light was strong enough to defeat the poison, but he wasn't sure about the noise and its strength. That should be his thing, it was supposed to be so, but there he was, all tied up because the music was so faint and he didn’t have a guitar to amplify the sound.

I didn’t need it before. I should not need it, but—

Haze was walking back to the center of the room, the buzz so loud around him that Chanyeol felt like someone was stabbing his brain with a hot, sharp knife. He had to think, he needed to concentrate, it was important that he tried, and more important that he succeeded. He had told Baekhyun the night before that he would get him home. And at whatever the cost, he wanted to. He want that boy to go back to a world where people would be healthy and okay and alive.

He needed to fight for everyone.

“I wondered for such a long time how to do something like this,” Haze was saying. When Chanyeol looked, he sensed the noise taking hold, cocooning him, and in the next second his feet had lifted from the floor. He went up, up, smiling widely, until he was floating in mid-air, exactly at the center of the ballroom, amid and connected to all the mirrors that remained. Chanyeol had to break down those, somehow, all at the same time. That was the plan, and his last chance, but even then he didn’t know how to do it exactly. So he hummed, so low, trying to call the faint music out. “How does someone open a gate between words so wide that all the energy comes rushing in? But then I realized something: I am a special creature, the chosen one. One of a kind. Mirror Traveling allows its users to open doors in the Soulstream; while Soul Magic controls emotions and feelings - the core of the Soulstream itself. The ancient Blessed connected the two worlds by using their own soul’s energy to manipulate, open and bind the Soulstreams of two different realities, but I don’t need to rely on my own, limited strength. Soul Magic is mine to command, after all, and mirrors are linked to me. There is noise everywhere, a hearable manifestation of the souls of both the world and the people who inhabit it. I only need to reach for it and make a call, and every gate in my way will open for me.”

Baekhyun’s light was so bright as he struggled in his invisible ties. “Stop it!” he called out.

His music was so loud, both piercing and soothing in Chanyeol’s head. Violins, repeating the same tune, over and over again - the cry, the war song, the melody unleashed, the suffocating lullaby turned powerballad, so different from the song that was always with him but also the same, deep at its core. It felt like an outstretched hand, and Chanyeol forced himself to stare at Haze in the face while he took it.

There was noise everywhere. Everywhere. But if he used Baekhyun’s song as a guide, he could also hear the music.

“Behold now!” his reflection exclaimed as the energy holding him in place turned visible, a pulsating conduit between the mirrors and his body. “This is the Soulstream, and it will follow my orders. As I stand here doors will open for me. This city, this world, are about to change!”

The sensation hit Chanyeol before the he could see it, a wave of nausea so hard that his whole body bent forward in a spasm.

“Chanyeol!” Baekhyun called him, generator burning but still not broken. He would be the most powerful when it was. And yet, they had no time, no time, no time.

“The mirrors!” he shouted.

The surfaces of all of them were undulating, rippling in their frames as if they were part of the same surface of water. Exactly like every time Chanyeol had hummed to mirrors as a child to open window, or when he played his guitar to break them - mirror and Soul Magic combined. But Haze wasn’t doing it as he did it, limited and controlled and partly afraid; instead, he was pouring in all the energy he had gathered, with such a force that the glasses all around him looked aflame, so bright on the walls of the white room.

When the mirrors started to give in, however, the first thing that Chanyeol felt was a gust of frozen, energy-charged wind on his face.

He could see the Soulstream, a force born at the other side of the mirror and connecting Insomnia to his world and it looked like an aurora borealis - multicolored light that filled the room, and poured out the windows, and connected Haze and him.

It was a beautiful vision, so enrapturing that even Baekhyun stopped to struggle and gazed up when the iridescent gleam cut through the miasma, but the wind should have been warm, not cold. Not like that.

“Haze!”

“Do you see this?” the man said, signaling at the thick ray of light that linked them. “This is the manifestation of the balance that keeps us tied. This is the key that will allow me to turn my dreams into a new world!”

“Wait, no!”

“Come to me!”

Haze rose his hands higher. Chanyeol choked on his breath. His reflection’s body had started buzzing, and the aurora was pulsing and surrounding him, bathing him in winter-cold light. He could still hear Baekhyun’s song, loud and clear, but his body was suddenly frozen and paralyzed, so weak that he could barely move. He tried to reach for his inner energy and what he found was a void: the whirlwind of his own strength, taken away by the Soulstream glow.

To Haze.

“You see? If you don’t let me in, I’ll be the one to take out every inch of what you have and that doesn’t belong to you. Both from you and from your world.”

He closed his eyes, clenching his teeth to keep a pained scream inside his throat. It hurt, like someone was stabbing him with shards of ice. His nerves screamed and his mind was reeling, thinking too fast and too incoherently for him to catch up. He was going to die. If he did nothing, he would die and his world would follow: the place that had seen him grow and the city where his friends and his mother lived would disappear, frozen in time and space.

He tried to move, one step forward, but the threads of noise keeping him in place didn’t give in. Baekhyun was calling him, voice so loud and song so clear, and Chanyeol opened his eyes groggily, blinking to focus them on the boy. He felt so weak and still Baekhyun stood there struggling, as strong as ever. He had no iridescent glow on him, no Soulstream link to connect him to the other half he had already lost.

He was clean. He was still strong. He had his own light.

So that’s how it is.

Chanyeol had still energy enough to act, once, only once. So he closed his eyes, and let himself be surrounded by Baekhyun’s violin music. He felt the thread, all around him, a variation of the Soul Melody. He grabbed it. He hummed along and sensed the white noise around him. Haze had tied them down well, but he was now controlling the Soulstream of two whole worlds above their heads and he was only human. So he focused on Baekhyun’s song, ordered it to get loud. Overcome the noise, he thought.

The violins shrilled. Chanyeol’s legs failed him and he fell to the floor, tied still by the noise. Baekhyun screamed something, and the boy heard steps coming towards him, and he knew he had succeeded much before he saw Baekhyun’s golden light through his closed eyelids and felt cool hands on his face.

“Chanyeol,” the boy called him. “Chanyeol. Stand up. You have to stand up.”

“I can’t,” he managed to murmur back. “He’s… He’s doing it already. My energy, he… He’s tilted the Soulstream. You have to…”

“What do I do?”

“Distract him.” Despite everything, his song was still loud and clear. The melody of the world, under the noise. The melody of the Soulstream. They were all variations of the same score after all. If only he could reach the sound, if only—

“And how am I supposed to distract him?”

Chanyeol opened his eyes. The generator was almost broken in Baekhyun’s chest. They didn’t have much time. He smiled. “Didn’t you say you’d go all out? Don’t tell me you don’t feel like punching him in the face.”

Baekhyun’s thumb traced the seam of Chanyeol’s lips, just like he had done the night before. Then, the softness of the contact was gone and his smile and his eyes had hardened. The right one was black, like Insomnia stone, the left was as grayish blue as opaque crystal. He nodded once and turned around, head tilted up.

“Hey!” he called out. “You giant floating white piece of shit! Guess who is on his way to kick your ass!”

He lit himself up, at full potency, skin incandescent and veins pure gold under his skin. Chanyeol heard a buzz and a hiss, and saw Baekhyun take his right hand to his chest and rip the blackened shape of the generator off his chest. It felt on the marble floor with a clank - the beginning of their own personal countdown.

It was then when Haze looked down. All of the mirrors had turned into open windows, showing a patch of night sky that felt strangely like home, and he stood at the middle of them, looking more amused than actually threatened. Miasma was pouring down from his eyes like black tears, and came out from his mouth as well when he parted his lips to speak.

“Ah, Baekhyunnie. What’s the problem, little boy? Do you feel like watching from up close until your turn arrives at the end? You’re not going to wither like my reflection will, you know? Balance cannot affect you. You should feel lucky: I’ll personally deal with you at the end!”

“Why not now?” Eyes never leaving Haze’s face, Baekhyun moved closer to one of the walls. Light was coming out from the cracks on his neck, face and chest, throbbing like the pulse of a living heart. Chanyeol tried not to think about that and focus on the song, aways the song. As long as Baekhyun’s melody rang loud, he could use it to separate his mind from the noise and concentrate. All of the melodies were variations, the same score modified. There was music too, in the Soulstream overhead: something strangely familiar. He needed to listen to that, more clearly. He needed to leave Haze completely in Baekhyun’s hands.

“You intend to fight me? I defeated you once, Baekhyunnie. I destroyed you after I made you. Beat me, you? You can’t do that. You’re a broken little toy.”

Baekhyun had walked backwards until his back was against one of the biggest mirrors. His breath was labored and shallow, and he looked more like a cornered animal than like a winner, but his voice did not shake. “Everyone is a toy to you, isn’t it so? Your family, your friends, your lovers and this town. That’s why you are so alone, right? Because you want to play but you destroy everything you touch. How much does that hurt you, deep down, Your Exalted Majesty?”

Haze’s smile froze in his face. “How dare you? I am the chosen one!”

“You’re a ruler of ruins. Desperate. Hideous. Despised. The person who built himself a substitute of the only man he truly loved because he damaged the original one beyond repair.”

“Shut up.”

Haze’s power gave in, only a bit, and Chanyeol took it greedily. The song was louder now in his ears - Soul Melody and Murder Melody, both and none.

“You turn everything you touch to ashes.”

“Shut up!”

All the variations together created a different melody. Haze, Chanyeol, Baekhyun, Insomnia, the Soulstream. The Song of Dementia. The Soul of the Music. The Song of the Unbroken. The Song of the World. Soul Melody. There was only one noise, Haze’s personal tune, but the music was one in many.

And he needed to grasp it.

“What a shame it is, that you can’t use your own power to erase all the pain from yourself.”

“I told you to be quiet!”

Haze was onto him in a second, descending from the ceiling and surrounded by solid noise. Baekhyun was cornered, with the mirrored wall behind and his attacker coming too fast from him to dodge to the sides. Chanyeol was about to run to him, but then he saw Baekhyun smile and stood where he was - he wasn’t there to fight his reflection: his actual role was to break two linked worlds apart.

Baekhyun’s music resounded the loudest. Chanyeol held it, tying himself to it. He was weak, but Haze’s strength would be his if he just turned the flow around.

The song had no lyrics, but he sang anyway.

Haze’s screamed and fell on Baekhyun like a bird of prey.

And the boy actually grinned and waved, before leaning back, over the undulating glass of a mirror that swallowed him in.

“What— No!” Haze called out.

Baekhyun’s shape appeared again, out from one of the mirrors overhead, hidden blades on his wrists aimed to kill when he felt directly on Haze. He found flesh, on the man’s arm and cheek, a strain of crimson staining the white.

“Forgot that I am a Mirror Traveller too?” Baekhyun’s smile was a vicious crack of white teeth on his golden skin as he landed gracefully in front of him, eyes following Haze’s retreating figure. “I don’t have magitec pieces in me anymore, you bastard!”

“You were always unworthy! Look at the pitiful thing you have become after I worked so diligently in making you special.”

The miasma that came from the mirrors and Haze’s shape was dissolving as soon as it touched the air, dissolved in a light so bright that Chanyeol could only see his reflection and Baekhyun, and the aurora over them. When Baekhyun removed the pearls of sweat from his forehead, chips of crystalized skin came with it. “No. Look closely at me. Do you see these cracks on my face? You tried to break me so hard, but you know what? I’m still here.”

He threw himself at Haze again, fast and deadly, and followed him across one of the mirrors when Chanyeol’s reflection tried to use his Travel ability to his advantage once more. And suddenly they were flying, from one mirror to another, so fast that they were two blurred shapes, moving too fast for Chanyeol to hear.

So he closed his eyes and kept singing. He could feel Baekhyun, and knew where he was because his song was always with him, and the melody of the Soulstream was just beyond, finally close enough for him to grasp it.

He felt so cold. He needed more power. The nausea was too strong for him to remain on his two legs anymore. He fell on his knees. He knew what mirror Baekhyun was using, so he started at the other side of the ballroom. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the mirrors clearly: gates, opened at the limit of they capacities, stealing life and enduring an amount of energy they weren’t supposed to. They were as tense as a thread about to snap.

He raised his voice in a wordless plea and the mirror closest to him exploded in a rain of a thousand tiny pieces.

He barely felt the burn and some of the shards of glass dug into the uncovered skin of his neck and face and scalp: they wouldn’t kill him so he had to move forward. He felt weak and dizzy for a second, but then the energy entered him, too hot and too cold and too intense. There it was, the first peak of his power, a current stronger than it had ever been.

He felt like a god. He felt like dying. He could hear the Soul Melody now, too loud.

He focused on the next mirror and shattered it into pieces.

“No!” Haze screamed, someplace above him. “You’ll burn yourself out from the inside. You’ll destroy my world. You foolish little—”

“Your rival here is me!” Baekhyun replied.

Chanyeol’s father had always told him he was special, had signed him up for classes and laughed in glee every time he heard his son coming up with a new song. And perhaps he had been born for that, he thought as he rode the wave, breaking one mirror after another. It was a domino effect, a force of nature he wouldn’t be able to stop, even if he wanted to. Standing in Haze’s ballroom was like looking at the world from the center of a kaleidoscope, and now the illusion was shattering, and the colored aurora of the Soulstream had become a wind that was covering the floor and walls in frost, and all the energy was coming into him, and Chanyeol felt so fucking cold that his insides were on fire.

The song was so loud now that he couldn’t hear anything else.

When he looked down at his hands he saw cracks on his skin.

So that was it.

“NO!”

Noise closed around his throat, a solid thread like the one Haze had used to immobilize him and Baekhyun before. His breath died, his song faltered, and Chanyeol remembered with something akin to amusement that the bond between worlds had not been broken yet - he had taken his energy back, he was the stronger one, and if he killed himself the balance would end Haze too.

What Haze didn’t understand was that the music was everywhere by then. He had said it himself before, in a speech he had never totally comprehended: when it came to Soul Magic at his purest form, everything was about controlling or being controlled, ruling over it or letting the power consume you.

“Chanyeol!”

He was choking. He couldn’t breathe. But when he looked up, Baekhyun was standing between his reflection and him. Not me, he would have wanted to tell him as he struggled to get up. Go for him. Get him. He looked at the other boy in the eye as his mind reeled, and perhaps Baekhyun understood, because he turned around.

“You’ve lost, Haze,” he whispered, and the words ringed inside Chanyeol despite of the wind and the song and the noise.

The Soul Melody was his to command, the Murder Melody his weapon of destruction. He didn’t need his voice to order, not when he was already one with the music, and he killed the mirrors one by one and all at the same time, in utter silence for everyone but himself, energy going out from them and into him. He was going to explode, too. He was splintering. The gates were closing, breaking, making the whole mansion shake at its core.

“No!” Haze screamed. “My world! My vision! You don’t understand what you’re doing! You’re breaking it all!”

He rushed towards Chanyeol, one hand stretched towards him. He had the wide, unfocused eyes of a madman and a crack forming on the place in his cheek when he had been cut before. He didn’t even look at Baekhyun - he never had, ever - so he never saw the blades on his wrists until they sank on the soft skin of his stomach.

Chanyeol felt the blow, not physically but somewhere inside him, in the part where the boundaries of his own soul blurred and his spirit was joined to Haze’s by aurora light, and it burned, two stabs in white. Still, he forced himself to stand up.

He barely made it to the place where Baekhyun was, a couple of steps before him, before collapsing against his back, head in the crook of the other boy’s neck and hands around his waist, giving him strength and borrowing his energy. “It’s over,” he murmured. “Baekhyun, he’s over.”

Red drops of blood were falling from the place where Baekhyun’s blade was still buried in Haze’s skin. Crimson on white - it reminded Chanyeol of the snow on the day he had crossed the gate for the first time, profaned. The bond between Haze and him was weakening: it had been a killing blow. Chanyeol could hear the song in him now, so clear. It always had been the same as the Song of the Worlds, the song between worlds.

One and the same, they were. They had always been.

“I am sorry,” Baekhyun said. Chanyeol didn’t know if he was apologizing to him, to Haze or to himself. “I really am.”

Haze’s white gloved hand went up to caress his face. He was smiling, so softly, and Chanyeol saw his own face in him, so clearly, for the first time. “You look… so much like him,” he said, miasma coming out of his eyes and mouth, falling down his face in thick, black streaks. “He always took the pain away.”

Chanyeol’s conscience flew to the center of the bond between them - it was a frail thing now, almost gone. Break, he commanded. The link splintered, cracked and broke; the freezing aurora wind surrounded them. He amplified the order to every song, every world, and let all the energy out as Haze’s face relaxed, eyes closing just before his eyelashes turned into glass. His whole face followed, solidifying, and Baekhyun took his blades out just before all of him turned into a statue that started to crack and finally splintered in a rain of transparent white.

Baekhyun collapsed, bringing Chanyeol down with him until they both where half sitting, half fallen on the floor. “The room,” he whispered. “The room is frozen.” And it was, like the whole of Haze’s mansion was made of ice.

“I broke it,” Chanyeol murmured back. “The bond between worlds. I broke it when I snapped the link between Haze and me. But there’s still too much energy… here. And Haze’s poison. It’s— You have to help me. Please help me.”

“Yes.”

They stood up together, supporting one another in their step as they walked towards the balcony at the far-end corner of the room. There were no mirrors left, not a single one, and the shards of broken glass cracked under their feet as they stepped out. Insomnia, on the outside, was still too grey, but there was no noise in the air anymore. Haze’s mansion and garden had turned into ice and glass, from the walls to the lake to the leafless trees outside, but the rest could be saved.

“I need your light,” Chanyeol said as he supported both his and Baekhyun’s weight on the handrail. “I need to carry your light, to make the miasma fade.”

Baekhyun nodded, eyes open and focused as he leaned against Chanyeol’s chest. He felt so cold - they both were. “This is my final duty,” he stated. “To Insomnia and to the people that I hurt.”

The song was still so loud, visible and shimmering sound - the brightest aurora the boy had ever seen. And it still listened to his commands, so he begged of it to take the light up, above the grey city, and turn it into lush black again.

Insomnia, the city that never slept. The city that would finally wake up from its nightmare.

At his side, Baekhyun chuckled. His fingers laced through Chanyeol’s, almost absently. “I can hear it, you know?” he said, and Chanyeol looked down.

“Hear what?”

“Your song, all over town. Healing it. We’re doing it, we already did. Haze’s dead, and we—”

The music was coming back to him, pure energy for him to manipulate. He was the only Soul Magic user now, standing in the same place Haze should have if he hadn’t allowed himself to be corrupted. The miasma was almost gone now and the worlds already breaking apart - without a bond, there wouldn’t be a balance, and without a flaw in balance, Euphoria Syndrome would disappear. Insomnia would heal by itself, but with the amount of energy he had he could accelerate the process - make it flourish again with one song and a flicker of his hand.

Only if that energy belonged to him. If he had any desire to be a king. If he didn’t have a perfectly ordinary life elsewhere.

Being the chosen one sounded awesome, if you were Haze instead of Park Chanyeol.

“You still want to come with me?” he asked.

Baekhyun looked up at him, mismatched eyes so dark. “Home? There are no mirrors left.”

“But would you, if you had the chance?”

The other boy looked around, at the city, black under the red and golden light of the dawn. “Yeah. If I had the choice, I— Yes.”

The energy was almost on him, and his body yearned to claim it. Instead of that, he pushed it down, ordering it to open a last door before the worlds were too far apart to cross between them. He didn’t know if it had worked, if it would ever by then, but it was worth the try.

“You do have a choice,” he said, releasing Baekhyun’s hand to climb over the balcony railing. The frozen surface of Haze’s personal lake was undulating, rippling like glimmering, golden water. “I didn’t arrive to Insomnia through a mirror, right? Everything it takes is a little leap of faith.”

Baekhyun stared at the water and, after an endless second, he actually laughed. He sounded happy, so happy, genuinely so, and that was more than enough of a reward. “Okay, you win,” he said, taking Chanyeol’s hand. “I’m in for this one, young man. But make it worth my while, will you?”

At that, Chanyeol snorted. “Always. Who do you take me for?”

Then he squeezed Baekhyun’s hand, as tight as he could, and jumped forward.

Encore - Requiem
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine

Chanyeol would have sworn that he saw another Baekhyun as they travelled through the Soulstream, a boy with black hair and sickly pale skin that smiled at him before everything faded. After that, he felt a crack and an impact, and there suddenly was something cold under his back and a grey, familiar sky above his head.

“Baekhyun,” he croaked. “Baekhyun.”

He was too tired to move. He felt like crying. He tried to sit up, fruitlessly, because he was still unsure of where he was, and exhausted, and he needed to check where Baekhyun was, but then a head of ash-brown hair appeared in his field of vision. It was a boy, one he knew too well, staring at him with a frown.

“Oh, fuck,” Chanyeol murmured.

The boy made a face. “Wow, I was going to ask you if you were okay but hey, if you have time to swear I guess you’re alive and well?”

Chanyeol laughed out loud, grabbing the boy by his half-burnt shirt to bring him down for a kiss. Baekhyun was trembling slightly because of the cold, but his skin was soft and warm, no traces of solidified glass or big, ugly cracks. “Your left eye. It’s still blue, you know?”

“Ah, is it?” Baekhyun’s voice was warm as he leaned back, still kind of straddling him, and helped him sit up. He kept smiling at him, and that was wonderful. “I don’t know what in the world I am going to tell the doctor about that. Or about the glass cuts, you know? Or about these scars.” He traced Chanyeol’s cheek with his index finger, and the boy was shuddering under the contact when he saw them too on Baekhyun’s skin: thin, silvery-white lines where the cracks had been. They were barely visible, only there if one looked close enough, but Chanyeol knew, deep down, that they would never go away.

And he didn’t mind it.

“Oh god, help me stand up, please. I’m freezing my ass off here,” he said, because after Baekhyun’s wellbeing, that was his highest priority.

“That is kind of what happens when you decide to take a nap on snow.”

“Snow,” repeated Chanyeol, as Baekhyun placed a hand around his waist to help in onto his feet. “Does that mean it worked? Are we back home?”

The other boy didn’t even need to reply, because as soon as he was standing and could properly look around, the familiarity of it all made his breath stuck in the knot of his throat. He remembered the trees so clearly, big, still leafless shapes surrounding the square where they stood: a small, silent place with green metal benches and a round stone fountain. The water in the basin had been frozen, but the ice was currently broken in half - Chanyeol’s entrance door to Insomnia, finally closed.

The place looked as he remembered, in every way except for the obvious passage of time. It had been night when he had left and was still night now that he had returned, but winter had been arriving when he had opened the gate and now it seemed about to leave, trees a bit stronger and grass a greener, patches of green under the white.

He was home. They were home, and the dull familiarity of his neighborhood suddenly felt more vibrant than a beautiful city that never slept.

“We are, right?” Baekhyun said. “Finally.”

When he reached inside of him, Chanyeol found nothing but silence. It felt so strange for a second, not having a song to go with all that, to be completely alone inside his head when he stared at Baekhyun. It was the first time in his life that he was completely deaf to his personal soundtrack - but he wouldn’t have said that he missed the sound.

He grinned. “Yeah, Baekhyun. Welcome back home.”

—

He learned at the hospital that his mother had been admitted in for treatment at her usual clinic while he was gone. It seemed like the most logical course of action, considering that she had never been okay, and that Chanyeol had been the only one both taking care of her and hiding her real condition.

“We all thought we were gone, Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo had told him, reproach clear in his voice, when he went to visit him at his own hospital room. He had rushed in across the door so early in the morning, just after the doctors finished stitching the glass cuts in his hands, face and neck and let him alone to rest. Visit hours must had started barely minutes ago, and his friend was already opening the door like he was torn between punching Chanyeol in the face and start crying.

God, Chanyeol had missed him. No matter how grumpy and bossy Kyungsoo could see, at least he was the type of person who would run to the hospital to see a friend no matter what, instead of hiding in a cave and doing nothing.

Baekhyun had had his own visitors as well, even before the open hours started. He had told Chanyeol about his mother, and his father, and his brother, and his dog, and judging by the muffled voices and sobs inside the room at the other side of the wall, at least all the humans in his family had come to greet him back.

Chanyeol hoped it’d be okay. He wanted to believe Baekhyun would be. He wanted to go see him again, but it there were moments in life people had to face by themselves.

And anyway, they had time now; they had all the time ever, and he, too, had pending issues to solve.

“Did you see the apartment?” he asked Kyungsoo. “When I was missing, did you look for me there?”

His friend was standing in the middle of the room. He had calmed down a bit after walking in, but that was making him much less nervous and more upset. “Yes. And we thought… For a moment the police were contemplating that perhaps she did something to you. In one of her… episodes.”

“She did not.”

“I know that! She said that you’d run away, and that you’d come back, and after the police dropped the case I started to believe her. She looked so certain about it when you were gone, so I didn’t know what to think. Especially considering how ill she really was. You never told us she needed help that badly.”

“I guess not. I told no one.”

“And why wouldn’t you?”

Chanyeol swallowed. “I guess I didn’t want her to be?”

“But she needed heavier treatment!”

“She did. But I thought I could be the one to provide the help she needed, and that I was the only one that had to, but… You go to the hospital when you’re sick, right? Sometimes there are things we can’t exactly do by ourselves.”

Chanyeol had stayed at the hospital for two more days. He had been treated and bandaged and stitched. He had been questioned, by the staff and the police. He had made friends with a clumsy nurse by the name of Zhang Yixing, and had laughed after discovering that he wasn’t exactly a fan of anything historical-related. He had been left out before Baekhyun, and so he had travelled to his mother’s clinic in Sehun’s car, dressed in new clothes and still overwhelmed by the familiarity of the world around him.

His best friend had punched him in the arm when he had seen him. Chanyeol had forgiven him because his car had air conditioning and looked so fucking cool and modern.

“Did you hit your head when you were gone?” Sehun had asked, looking (a little bit more than) mildly concerned for his wellbeing, and Chanyeol had laughed it off.

“Stars, no!”

Sehun had looked at him for a moment before starting the engine. “Stars,” he had repeated. And Chanyeol had said nothing else, but his smile had been so wide.

He had been so nervous, however, when they had finally arrived to the clinic. He had entered his mother’s room alone, with his arms and neck and chest bandaged under his clothes, but with a new kind of courage in his mind. And she had been there, still looking sickly and weak, with her skin a bit too pale and his smile a bit too soft, but her eyes had focused on him the moment she saw him walk in.

“Chanyeol,” she said. She had been sitting on a chair near the window and she stood up, hands clasped over her chest. Chanyeol was secretly glad that the rooms in her tiny hospital room were painted light yellow instead of white.

“Mother,” he replied. “I’m back.”

She took a couple of steps forward, too fast for her accompanying nurse to stop her, and before any of them could react she was hugging her son, arms tight around his waist. Chanyeol gasped, wordless. She was the first one to speak.

“You forgot your lucky charms. You forgot them, even though I told you to wear them, and so I knew the monsters had taken you away. Didn’t I warn you? To stay away from your demons?”

Chanyeol swallowed hard, clumsily wrapping his arms around his mother’s back. Euphoria Syndrome was gone, and its counter-effects at the other side of the mirror should be, too, after the gates had closed. And still, wounds needed time to heal - and not all of them did, not completely. But things would get better. They would. He had faith on that; was willing to fight. “Yeah, you did. And you know what, mom? Those demons got me for a moment, but in the end I won. Do you hear that? I was the victorious one.”

His mother smiled against his chest. “I am proud of you.”

And Chanyeol, somehow, was as well.

His melody had been silent since he had returned, but the nightmares were also gone.

—

Chanyeol had bribed Baekhyun to help him paint the house in exchange for Overwatch lessons. It had seemed like a great idea at first, because it had meant he got a helping had, videogame time and Baekhyun’s presence in general, but he had soon realized that the plan didn’t work as well in terms of efficiency when he had both his computer and the boy of his dreams to keep him distracted.

“You’re nervous,” he said. Baekhyun huffed and pressed a leg between his thighs, presumably to shut him up. Sadly, he didn’t succeed. “You’ve cornered me against a wall in my own apartment because you are nervous as hell.”

“I’ve cornered you because you have sky blue paint in your face.” Chanyeol was about to reply that such a statement made no sense, but then Baekhyun was kissing him, hard, and who was him to deny him? He was a practical man, he knew how to recognize good luck when it came knocking on his door - or was practically settled between his legs, or… something. When they pulled away, however, it took Baekhyun approximately half a second to start biting his lip. “It’s really that obvious that I'm nervous?”

“I don’t know if Sehun and Kyungsoo will realize when they arrive, if that’s what you’re asking, but either way your secret’s safe with me.”

Baekhyun groaned, leaning face down on the wall besides Chanyeol. “Whatever you do, please don’t let me mess this up. I swear I’ll punch you in the face if you do. Or I’ll punch myself, depending on who’s responsible.”

“You’ll do fine. My mother already likes you.”

“Your mother and I have developed a weird sense of camaraderie because I go for therapy at the same clinic where she’s hospitalized. That, and I have always good at making middle-aged ladies like me. I am such a charmer.”

“You’re almost admitting you’ll do good, then.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“I have faith in you, though.”

Baekhyun moved his forehead away from the wall just enough to be able to stare at him. He looked all lovely, a young man dressed in one of Chanyeol’s old t-shirts, with his hair ruffled and paint of the crook of his neck. “That’s—” he started. “I really wanted to meet them before you all start the heavy rehearsals for your debut gig, but I don’t know—” The loud ring of the doorbell made him interrupt himself with a gasp. “Oh. Oh. Already?”

“Most likely. Are you ready or do you want me to send them away?”

“What? No! That would count as messing up, and I told you I’d punch you in the face if you did. I’m just—”

“Nervous, I know.” Chanyeol snickered as he made his way to the front door with Baekhyun in tow. His apartment looked so different after the both of them had worked to fix it. It had become a place full of light after they had changed the glasses, took away his mother’s lucky amulets and painted the walls the color of the sky. It had already started to become a great place to make new memories in, and he couldn’t wait to show everyone. He had lost the power that had made him different, but the end of the war had turned him a different kind of special. “We’re coming!”

Kyungsoo and Sehun were at the other side of the door, and had brought bags of what looked like snacks and drinks. “Are you up for a break?” Sehun asked.

“I thought you had come here to help.”

“I have personally come here for information.” Kyungsoo left his bag on Chanyeol’s hands and walked himself in, gaze traveling from his friend to Baekhyun. “You still have a lot of explaining to do. What happened for you to be gone for weeks and then reappear out of the blue and with a boyfriend?”

“And a cute one at that,” added Sehun. “No offense, but I was staring to believe that you were going to die alone. It was either that or getting married to a giant standee of Overwatch’s Hanzo.”

At that, Baekhyun’s chuckled. “Well, he can get a giant standee of me now, if he’s into that.” Sehun guffawed, and before Chanyeol could open his mouth and protest because he had not organized that meeting so they all could gang up in a gratuitous attack against him, Baekhyun offered his hand for Sehun to shake. “Hi. I am the boyfriend in the flesh, by the way. Name’s Baekhyun.”

Sehun accepted the greeting, humming softly. “I am still upset with you, Park, for disappearing for so long, but I had to admit I do like this guy. He has an… interesting eye color, but he’s cool.”

Baekhyun looked so satisfied at the praise that Chanyeol felt too happy to be bothered by the slight reproach in his friend’s voice. He’d deal with that, eventually, but he had to take one step at a time.

“He does look like a decent person, but right now I am more interested to know how you met,” Kyungsoo added, following Chanyeol to the living-room. The place was still a mess, with the walls recently painted and the furniture they had managed to salvage covered in old white sheets. “I have to admit I am very curious about where you were and why you have matching scars. At least, please tell me they are not some kind of couple tattoo attempt.”

Chanyeol snorted. “No, not really. I’ll tell you that story eventually, but I don’t think it’s something you would believe right now, so I’m keeping it for myself until you’re prepared.”

“You could try your luck,” said Kyungsoo. “I am known for being very understanding.”

It was Baekhyun who replied, leaning his head on Chanyeol shoulder with a shit-eating grin. “Let me see, we could try. I have always been good at storytelling. This one tale, actually, starts in a black city that never sleeps.”

From the sofa, Sehun rolled his eyes. “Okay, okay, you don’t want to share what you did in your secret trip yet. I get it, and I’ll be waiting until we do, but can we eat now? I came here for the food and I paid for it too, so indulge me.”

Baekhyun’s smile softened while his fingers interlocked with Chanyeol’s. “They’ll listen, someday, but meanwhile let’s enjoy, okay? We’re lucky to be back. I’m lucky to be here. So thank you.”

“Yeah.”

Baekhyun hit him in the arm, but he was too happy to care. His boyfriend was right, and things were not perfect, but were getting steadily better. And for the first time in his life he was going to close his eyes and enjoy it all as it came - everything that life had planned for him.

He was Park Chanyeol and he was the luckiest boy in the world.

Murder Melody,
A Requiem in 13 acts.
FIN

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Murder Melody

baeconandeggs, Ink-and-stars (AriasOfSnow)

Chapter 3: Murder Melody (3/3)

Chapter by baeconandeggs

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