Two Years Ago

It was a whim… He was so close to the edge but it was only a whim.

“To be or not to be – that is the question,” Luhan said aloud, looking up at the pitch black night sky. He paused to chuckle before he spoke once more. “I address tonight’s absent stars and my question is this: to live or to die?”

There was no response, as expected, so Luhan turned around and prepared to step down. “To—”

It was then that the universe responded by finishing Luhan’s sentence for him, only with actions rather than words. Everything happened so quickly that all Luhan could remember of that moment were a blur of images – the heavy shower drenching him to the skin, the black Maserati on the road in front of him skidding against the wet asphalt, the ground slipping beneath his feet… And then Luhan was falling, falling backwards off of Mystic Bridge, down into the watery depths of the River Lei and into the welcoming embrace of death.

He struggled in vain to resurface, hands desperately reaching for anything that he could grab on to pull himself out of the water. His surroundings were too dark, the rain was falling too hard and he may have pulled some flowers off the riverbank in an attempt to rescue himself but alas, there was no saving Luhan.

It is said that when one dies, his life flashes before his eyes. A fuzzy haze of memories indeed flew by in Luhan’s mind as he, his eyes now closed, slowly descended below the river’s surface as gracefully as a water nymph.

The stars are coming out now, Sehunnie. The night sky is painted in a silver ocean of stars and I will be one with them. Aren’t they beautiful? We are all small specks of starlight in this dark and vast universe.

His palm gently opened up to release the two flowers which had unknowingly been in his grasp as the last of his consciousness slipped away from him. And as Luhan drifted off into a slumber from which he would possibly never wake, his sleeping figure descending as beads of water softly kissed his skin, he never would have known then how the stars loved him as he loved them. He never would have known the significance of the two flowers ascending upwards away from him and towards the surface where the river water blurred the sight of sparkling stars amidst rainy skies. The stars which glimmered brightly enough to be seen by closed eyes shone like fireworks that night – it was all for Luhan.

“Luhan… Luhan…”

A gentle voice travelled through the darkness and when his eyes slowly fluttered open, Luhan found himself lying in a desolate place where all was white. He curiously gazed around at his surroundings as he slowly sat up but all he could see was whiteness from the walls to the floors, from the rolled-up sleeves of his dress shirt to the tight jeans in which his shirt was tucked.

“Luhan, you’re all right now.”

The owner of the voice placed a comforting hand on Luhan’s shoulder and when the boy glanced upwards, he saw a kind-looking girl crouch down to his level. Her light brown hair was long, her chocolate brown eyes were soft although devoid of twinkle and her pink lips contained a tiny shadow of a smile. Luhan noticed that just like him, the girl was also dressed in cloud-coloured clothing.

“What is this place?” asked Luhan tentatively.

“You’re in the Palace of Whiteness. This is a realm within another realm that was once our home,” the girl answered as she sat down beside the dazed boy. “Do you remember anything at all, Luhan?”

He hesitated at that before he repeated the name that she had addressed him by. “Lu…han… That’s my name, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she told him. “You’re Luhan and I’m Jihyun.”

“I remember falling into the water… It was dark…and it was raining… And then it was dark again. Jihyun, I…I think I was dying,” Luhan finally concluded, his face paling.

Jihyun nodded in understanding before she raised her hand upwards into the air and placed it down on top of her head. Luhan had not earlier noticed but on Jihyun’s hair was a wreath of golden-coloured flowers woven together in a delicate circle, weightlessly sitting atop her hair.

“Though I know it’s there, I can’t feel my halo,” she whispered in a tone that sounded slightly melancholic. “Can you feel yours?”

Luhan suddenly became very aware that there was something of an accessory in his black hair but when he reached up in an attempt to touch his halo, his hand went right through the flower wreath and yet he felt nothing. He shook his head at her.

“Our halos are there yet we can’t feel them. Perhaps the legend is true after all,” said Jihyun thoughtfully. “But there’s something more important I should be telling you.”

“What is that?” he asked.

Jihyun extended her arm towards Luhan’s halo but when her hand was greeted with no tangible object, she hummed in thought before turning her attention back to his face. “You’re a guardian angel, Luhan, and so am I. Our duty is to look after the people we once lived amongst in another world.”

“Oh.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in. The fact that angels are typically unable to retain human memories doesn’t help either.”

Luhan crossed his legs as he tried to process what little information he had but trying to make sense of things was impossible when he had hardly any memories to work with. “Jihyun, are there many like us?” he finally asked.

“Yes, there are, but we won’t see them,” answered Jihyun, busying herself by tying her hair into a side ponytail with a pink ribbon. “This region is only for us to watch over. It is a place where we once lived called Guangjing.”

“I feel empty.”

The moment Luhan said those words, he caught sight of his name on Jihyun’s pink ribbon but just as abruptly as he had seen it, it disappeared.

“Me too, Luhan. Me too.”

Most people would be delighted to have superpowers; Luhan, on the other hand, was not. Not at all. Being an angel with the easier-said-than-done duty to take care of those who lived in Guangjing was already a challenge itself but trying to control his powers without making a complete fool of himself was a whole other story. Luhan had difficulty being able to tell whether or not he was visible to the human eye, he often showed up at the wrong place at the wrong time and worst of all, he was absolutely terrible at unleashing the required powers that dire circumstances demanded.

It was an understatement to say that Luhan was fortunate to have the sweet and empathetic Jihyun by his side. She had the tendency to insist time and time again that everything would come to him naturally, that learning the ways of an angel was based entirely on intuition, but they both knew that the fundamental problem lay in the truth and that was that Luhan at being a guardian angel. It had already not been a good sign when the discovery of him having superpowers led to a sudden burst of water surging from his hands and him unintentionally starting a rainy season in the midst of summer.

“It’s fine, really,” Jihyun had told him. “I bet not all angels have full control of their powers in the beginning.”

“Did you?” Luhan had asked sadly.

But the boy knew what the answer would be even before he asked for it. Their deaths had not been so far apart yet Jihyun excelled at her duties whilst Luhan was as hopeless as someone who had died yesterday despite the fact that it had been over a year.

“Hey, sis. Do you remember how long ago it was that you were a human?” Luhan questioned Jihyun one day as they stood in the middle of the Palace of Whiteness located in a realm within a realm.

“Sorry, bro, now’s not the best time,” the other replied as she swept her cascading brown hair aside to adjust the collar of her sleeveless white top. “A name just appeared on my ribbon so I’ve got to head out. Didn’t you have a shift?”

Luhan peered down at his wrist around which was the silver diamond-encrusted bracelet he had died with. “No, a name hasn’t appeared,” he muttered with a shake of his head.

Jihyun hummed in response as she tucked her button-down shirt neatly into her ivory high-waisted shorts. She was in the midst of suggesting things that Luhan could do to entertain himself in her absence but stopped midsentence when she realised that she had nowhere to put her ribbon. It was something she carried with her at all times and within the Palace of Whiteness, it was one of the few things along with Luhan’s bracelet that had colour. Whilst Luhan had died with a silver bracelet around his wrist, Jihyun had died with a pink ribbon in her hair, and though seemingly insignificant items, they were all that the two guardian angels had of their past lives.

Luhan glanced up from his bracelet when Jihyun fell silent and he immediately chuckled upon seeing her struggling to tie her pink ribbon around her wrist.

“You need help, don’t you?”

“No way, I’ve totally got this.”

Luhan huffed in amusement and strode over to Jihyun before he took the ribbon out of her grasp and neatly tied the pink material into a small bow around her wrist. “There, your outfit is complete now, sis.”

“Aww, look at you rushing to people’s aid like the brilliant guardian angel you are!” Jihyun said with a proud grin as she ruffled Luhan’s hair, her hand going straight through his flowery halo as she did so. “Thanks, bro. I’ll see you later, okay?”

“See you!” Luhan called out to her vanishing form.

Jihyun had not yet fully dematerialised and it was right before she teleported out of sight that Luhan saw that she had been pointing at his bracelet. He was planning to shrug it off as nothing but when Luhan’s eyes curiously flitted down to his wrist, he noticed something that had earlier not been there. Written across the surface of the metal was a name and as Luhan brushed a thumb across the engraved letters, he never would have known then how deeply embedded in his heart this single name Oh Sehun was.

His eyelids flickered shut as he prepared himself for teleportation and when Luhan opened his eyes again, he was relieved to find that he was no longer standing in the Palace of Whiteness but on a pavement of a quiet bridge he did not recognise. Not too far from where Luhan had materialised was a pink-haired boy perched alone upon the bridge’s stone railing overlooking a river and when the angel checked his bracelet once again and saw the letters Oh Sehun dimly glowing, he knew. Luhan knew that this boy was Oh Sehun, the boy he was assigned to briefly watch over, the boy he was to protect. But even as Luhan took slow steps towards Sehun’s back, the former knew nothing more than that.

Why were we brought together? He seems fine.

No sooner had those thoughts formed in Luhan’s mind than a searing pain erupt through his head. He was gasping in pain as he fell forwards and grasped onto the bridge railing to steady himself. And for the first time since becoming an angel, memories of another life flowed into his mind.

He remembered lying in the comfort of his bed, ignoring the loud shouts from downstairs and the pattering rainfall on the other side of the window. All his concentration was on one point of focus and that was the person he knew as “Sehunnie”.

From: King Hun

To: ♡Luhannie♡

You’re just trying to get rid of me, aren’t you? >_<

From: Luhan

To: Sehunnie ♡

Of course not! I would never ever do that~ But really, my birthday is just going to be like any other day… ._.

It was only a snippet of a longer memory but even as Luhan struggled to make sense of things, he knew that the night he died was the night before he turned eighteen years old. He was still firmly clutching onto the stone railing as the brief flashback ended, his head bowed down in the direction of the sunlit waters below which felt so oddly familiar to him.

And as Luhan stood half bent over the railing and breathing heavily, it was right beside him where Sehun sat on top of the railing, forgotten both in Luhan’s past and his present. The pink-haired boy could not see or hear the angel but a part of Sehun told him that he was not alone. Looking down at the clear waters gently flowing towards the endless horizon where the setting sun met the calm River Lei, Luhan and Sehun were together once more but neither of them knew.

Sehun looked to his left and slowly extended a hand forwards, seemingly through thin air, in an attempt to feel the presence of someone…but his hand simply went through Luhan’s invisible back and neither of them knew. It was only when a deep sigh escaped Sehun’s lips that Luhan snapped out of his reverie and turned to glance at the boy he was meant to be watching over. But Luhan never saw his face. What he saw instead was the pink-haired boy standing atop the bridge.

There are only two paths for me.

Luhan tore himself away from the bridge in shock as thoughts that were not his loudly resounded through his head.

Should I join you in the cool water’s depths, hyung?

Or turn my back on you and move on?

Tremendous pain throbbed through Luhan’s head as he backed away with his eyes tightly closed, failing to notice that Sehun was edging closer and closer towards the edge of the railing.

You who I have always known.

You who I have never lived without.

You…my entire universe is you.

And it was upon hearing Sehun’s concluding thought that Luhan’s eyes snapped open at once in the same moment that Sehun’s eyelids flickered shut as a shadow of a smile graced his face.

We are all small specks of starlight in this dark and vast universe.

The voice that Luhan heard in his head was his own and nobody else’s yet despite that he was unable to decipher its meaning. He could not understand his own thoughts and that was when he realised that that was because it wasn’t his own thought at all, at least not at that present moment. It was an auditory flashback.

Luhan gazed past Sehun’s standing figure and ahead at the shimmering sunlit waters of River Lei as incomprehensible recollections and overwhelming emotions ran through him and then suddenly Luhan remembered that night. He remembered it all from the messages he had exchanged with someone he called “Sehunnie” to the agony he had felt as he ran under the heavy rain of that cold dark night. Those waters… He had died in those waters and now this mysterious pink-haired boy he was meant to protect wanted to do the same.

So this is why I’m here to save you – to prevent another from meeting the same fate. What are you even doing here, Oh Sehun? If I were to ask you about your story, would you tell me?

The angel sighed in disappointment but even as he set his gaze down on the ground with the memories of his death returned, it never occurred to him that the Oh Sehun he was assigned to protect was the same Sehunnie he had once known. Luhan lifted a hand glowing with silver light up in the direction of the bridge and as he did so, an abrupt gust of wind passed by and in the midst of the breeze, an unseen force effectively pulled Sehun off the railing and lightly brought him to a standing position on the pavement.

The name Oh Sehun faded away from Luhan’s bracelet when his task was complete and the angel tucked his hands into his pockets as he turned to walk away from the pink-haired boy whose face he ended up not having quite caught a glimpse of. And little did Luhan know as he headed down the quiet road leading back towards the city centre, his figure had become visible, illuminated by the light of the setting sun, and a certain boy with pink hair and curious eyes was watching his retreating back in awe.

Headlights shone blindingly upon the bewildered face of a tall, dark-haired pedestrian as a black cab pulled to a screeching halt in front of him. The taxi driver stuck his head out of the window with a deep scowl on his face and the first thing he did was to immediately start shouting at the tall man who had almost been run over. “Get out of the road, you tosser! You bleeding mad?!”

“Dear Lord…” the pedestrian mumbled as he spun around on the spot, marvelling at the sparkling sight of the bright city around him. “Where on God’s earth am I?”

“Got to be joking me. This one’s stoned,” snapped the cabbie.

“Oh, I say, my deepest apologies for blocking your vehicle, sir. I-I’ve just lost my way,” the tall pedestrian stammered, taking off his top hat and revealing his ears which slightly stuck out and were currently reddening with embarrassment as he proceeded towards the pavement in confusion.

The cabbie followed the steps of the pedestrian with narrowed eyes and grunted in distaste at his Victorian-style clothing but he was not done berating the young man. “Lay off the drinks, son, and on your bike.” He