Story Time 8 (Born of Fire and Blood)

The fire burned in a perfect ring, no openings in sight. Kibum didn't bother looking, either; didn't even whip his sight around for an escape. He just stood in the center, watching from the wrong side of the flames as Minho tried saving him with his pails and his hose reels and his phone calls to 119.

He wanted to tell the other to stop because there was a note left on the study desk. He wanted to assure the boy that this is what he wanted. But if he opened his mouth he'd have to swallow in the smoke. And as much as he wanted to be in here, he wanted to take his time. He wanted to revel in the feeling of approaching death. Kibum wanted to savor this as long as he could.

"B-bum!" Minho coughed out, covering his wet face with a palm. "Bum! Try to run towards me!"

Kibum tilted his head as if affectionately. He would've let out a little laugh at the words were he not about to burn to a crisp. The heat gradually crawled over his body, gripping his skin under his baggy clothes. His lungs started to flood with soot. It was time. He raised his hand in a wave, fingers splayed like he was reaching out to hold something and pull it to himself.

Goodbye, he said in his head.

But Goodbye wasn't the romantic adieu he pictured when he poured those large gasoline circles around the house and set the living room ablaze. There was no gradual fading of consciousness or gentle dissolving of his body into ash.

Once the clothing had been burned away from his body, the fires met his flesh and like meat in a pan, Kibum's skin began to sizzle. Big bubbling pustules burst on his skin and exploded while the fire searched him for fat. and flicking about, Kibum screamed in agony at the pain.

Pain Minho was forced to witness helplessly once every effort was exhausted to rescue his lover. Minho watched the scorch marks grow on formerly pale skin that first went red, and then sooty black and back to sickening white. The flames were everywhere and yet they didn't cover Kibum from view but rather spread slowly around him, teasing Minho with a horrific peep show. And in the way Minho could never take his eyes off Kibum in life, Minho couldn't turn away from the man's gruesome demise.

Kibum knew it wasn't just his voice wailing in the living room that was slowly shirking into a tiny little hole in the ground that wouldn't even fit his foot under normal circumstances. He heard sirens just outside the crackling flames, informing both of them of the paramedics. And suddenly mid-scream he let go of a guffaw that gave him a strange power in his veins. It pulsed in what used to be his fingertips. It flared in what used to be his calves. It boiled his blood over and evaporated it like water, creating an odd mist of hemoglobin in the air around Minho.

"Kibum!" he yelled pulling at his own hair now, face smeared with crimson when he ran his palms over himself in frustration, going mad with what he was watching happen before himself. "Kibum!"

When his feet left the floor and he levitated a few feet high off the ground... that was when Minho shook his tear-stained head and beat his fists to the ground like he'd gone completely insane. Or maybe he'd been doing that for a while Kibum couldn't tell very well. Everything was floating on another surface of consciousness now, he'd become a different being. He was no longer a feeble mass of flesh and blood.

The sense of become something OTHER overtook Kibum and a calm like nothing he'd ever known possessed his soul.

His soul.

Always a cynic, Kibum wanted to laugh because there was no way he could reconcile his previous disbelief with the absolute fact that all that now remained of Kim Kibum was a soul, now rising over the huddled corpse he had been trapped in for the last 24 years.

Stripped down to the essence of his self, Kibum had no care, no worry and no grief. Impure thoughts like sadness or regret couldn't cling to his new, pure form. This was true freedom, unencumbered by the weight of a restless mind. This was the freedom he had craved in life but never found. Kibum was now free, and without casting a last glance at the ruins behind him, he escaped into the vast expanse of night.

Minho scratched and pulled at the carpet under him. He shouted and beat his fists at the floor. Logic dictated he run for his life as the fire began to eat away everything that remained of their little house. But he wanted to burn, too. Suddenly he wanted to be engulfed in the residual flames that had released Kibum to his final mutant form, hoping he'd find himself to be another creature of fire. But the rules don't work like that... and in case he was wrong about his element he didn't want to die.

"Come back," he begged the air that crackled in the wake of Kibum's departure. "Please come back. I can't live without you, please..." he sobbed. "Come back, you bastard..." He growled to the door and punched it over and over, acting as if the other was just in the next room instead of sweeping over the night sky, testing his fledgling powers.

"Come back to me, please!"

When the firefighting team finally broke in through a window, he was too fargone to realize someone picking his body up and over their shoulder.

"It's okay, buddy. I gotcha."

Minho wanted to fight the rescue. To tell them to let him go, let him join his lover in the dark void of space. But mortal lungs failed him, the smoke burning his protests in his throat. Hacking and coughing were the only verbal expressions he could make. Even kicking and fighting the man carrying him would have to wait as his body instead chose the fight for oxygen.

It was agony crossing that threshold into the cooler air of evening. Leaving the intense heat and emotions of the flames for oxygen and reality, Minho broke. Now there was no chance for him to morph into that transcendent being Kibum had become. Apparently only one phoenix could be born in this nest.

Neighbors had gathered to watch one half of that weird gay couple be dragged from a place most of them never wanted them in the first place. This was a decent community and their presence was an affront to Sunday morning morality. So they stood like villagers at an ancient witch hunt, internally thanking the fire as purge.

"Name"

Minho swayed in the chair, weighed down by grief.

"Name?!"

When he didn't answer the inquiry a second time the police officer sighed and slammed his fist on the desk.

"Damnit how the hell am I supposed to help you when I don't even know the basics?! Park! Come in here!" he suddenly barked for his subordinate, who stumbled in a few seconds later.

"Can you tell me why this young man is sitting before me right now? He seems to have lost his voice."

"Uhh sir, th-that is..." the man stuttered. "He's the only witness to the disturbance last night in the south. There was an uncontrollable fire and everything in the house was burnt except... e-except..."

"Spit it out."

"W-we found this one completely unharmed."

The officer returned his attention back to Minho, expression thoughtful. "Another mutation victim, eh?" he rubbed a hand over his tired features. "How many has it been this week alone? Twenty seven? Damn kids getting their ideas from ridiculous places..." he grumbled.

"S-sir the neighbors say they saw something else in the sky last night, right after the explosion in the house." The man hesitated before going on. "Th-there was a man of fire in the s-sky, sir..."

"Man of fire? What are you talking about Park? Is this more of your mutant conspiracy theory crap?"

"No sir. One of the kids took a p-picture with his phone. LOOK." The junior officer held out a cell phone with grainy but certain photo of a man-shaped ball of flame soaring towards the moon over the still burning beams of a building.

"Holy !" Confronted with evidence of the fire element's awakening, the lead officer snatched up Minho by his collar, shouting in his face.

"Listen you pile of worthless filth. I don't care what you sick sons-of-es do in your private time. But you ARE going talk, if I have to pry that pretty little mouth of yours open with my bare hands. NOW, WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?"

Minho had no answer. Minho hadn't known any others for years. Only Kibum. It was always Minho and Kibum. Now it was just...

"Boss, the feds are here and asking to talk to the survivor. We're gonna have to hand him over.

Furious at being undercut by the government agents, he gave Minho a hard knee to the gut and release him in a pained huddle on the floor. Spitting on the boy, the older officer and the one named Park left Minho alone. Again.

"Please bring him back to me," he begged the ground of the station office, not caring in the least about his own injury. "Please bring Kibum back to me," he cried again. "He's my everything... please. Someone bring him back to me." He curled into himself and lay there till a hand rested on his forehead and gently his fringe away.

"Sir, he's running a fever," a voice informed the air.

Another hand, warmer and softer, reached out and pulled Minho to his back. The blurry features of a man with golden eyes and a sharp jawline came into view. "They should've been more careful with you..." he said in a soft, slightly high-pitched voice. "You're so ill with heartache, it could take your life." He turned to his colleague.

"Take him to the Grant Hospital at once. Make sure he's taken care of by one of our own doctors." The other officer nodded and Minho moaned for Kibum once more, voice breaking with sobs. They looked down at him with strange compassion. "Don't let anyone else come in contact with him," the golden-eyed federal agent added before bending low and whispering to Minho.

"It's all going to be OK."

"Kibum..Ki..bum..."

Minho felt himself floating in some sort of suspension medium, not liquid but not solid. It was cool on his skin but left him disoriented. In the gel, Minho didn't need to breathe or see leaving his senses dull. Perhaps he was upright or maybe he was lying on his back. There was no solid surface to touch, no boundaries to test. Just limitless floating in a sea of goo.

The peace was beautiful and if he could, he would stay like this until all thoughts of Kibum vanished from his memory. Minho's never been lucky in that way.

"Can you hear me? Choi, if you can hear me,wiggle your fingers."

It took a moment for Minho to orient himself with his body's current positioning but soon he was drawing back his pointer, ring, pinkie finger and thumb to wiggle his remaining finger in a circle.

"Funny, Choi. I can tell you will be a joy to work with. I am Lee Jinki and my team and I been watching you and your partner for years. Now that the Kim boy has assumed his final form, we have come...to take you home."

"Just hurry and kill me," he shook his head at the ceiling. "I'm tired of this life, just end it for me, would you." His hands clawed at the sheets, his neck pushed into the pillow, his feet pressed against the frame of his bed. Even if they didn't end up together in this world, he'd try in the next dimension. He'd try despite knowing intrinsically that it was impossible. He'd try no matter what.

"Just kill me right now and--"

"Be quiet," Jinki tapped his arm. He looked around the as if checking for eavesdroppers, sighing when he found nothing to hinder their conversation. "You humans always talk like children, no matter how old you get physically," he rested his chin on the edge of the mattress, looking at Minho with dismal eyes.

"I'll help you..." he nodded his assurance. "But I'll need my payment in full before we begin. That is my condition. Take or leave." Minho didn't even find it in himself to fight the air filling his lungs again and again, he definitely has no strength to argue with the Jinki. "This is a big decision, Choi. You need time to think about it, you have it."

"Do what you have to. I just want to be with Kibum again."

"Say the words, Choi Minho. Do you agree to my terms? I need your absolute agreement as this decision is irreversible." Jinki studied the other for any hint of doubt. All he found was weary resolve. It was enough to make Jinki wish he didn't have to take so much from an already weak person.

"I will give you ANYTHING you want if you will bring Kibum back to me." As the last word fell from his lips, Jinki unsheathed his knife and jammed it between Minho's ribs, slicing through him easily. Then with a flick of his wrists, there was a sick cracking sound and the muted gurgle of blood filling Minho's lungs, displacing the air and drowning him.

The ceiling and floor exchanged places. Time slowed to a crawl, where the screams of mortal beings around them dimmed to a low groan. Jinki cursed and stumbled back from the grip of the knife. He was unaffected by gravity because of his own celestial power but his sight began to swing to and fro like the beads of a metronome.

The blood oozing out of Minho's mouth began to take a life of its own, slowly take shape and assume size. It pooled and then it collected itself in a form much resembling Minho's human body--something that was now a deflated bag of bones. Jinki frowned, concentrating all his power into readying a weapon in his hands in case of a fight.

But the seemingly volatile being of crimson only turned its head-like appendage towards him dismissively for a few seconds. It drifted a few feet off what was meant to be the flooring tiles. And as its feet took off of the material world, time raced back to its original pace, spinning everything out of place.

"..." Jinki said to himself.

How had Jinki not seen the signs? Minho survived the inferno and self-awoke from the inertia treatment. And the despair, not a slight malaise but utter loss at losing his partner. All signs. Jinki wouldn't require his payment this time. What does an immortal require on Earth's last day?

And this was the end. Unfettered by cumbersome human bodies, Fire and Brimstone were now free to consume the world the way it had been foretold and Jinki had a front set.

Tapping his cigarettes against his wrist to loosen a lone stick from the pack, Jinki choose to concentrate on this well practiced exercise in sanity preservation. The soft crackling sound of the tobacco alight felt real. Drag after drag pulled him farther away from the dawn of the Apocalypse allowing him to surf his memories acquired over a thousand years, back to the beginning and the prophecy.

After all this time, Jinki must have forgotten...he was always meant to be the bringer of end times.

Written with Isadora_Quagmire (goddess extraordinaire)

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Wolfburglar
#1
KEEP GOING