Jongdae was supposed to die.

In an ideal world, where everything goes exactly as planned, he would’ve been escorted to the execution room by two surly guards, strapped into an electric chair, and given a chance to say his last words. They would have thrown a black cloth over his head, turned up the electricity, and that would’ve been it for him.

Goodbye, world. Hello, darkness.

Goodbye, murder charges. Hello, freedom.

But Jongdae doesn’t die. Instead, he feels a chill run up his spine, spreading into his fingertips as he tastes harsh metal in his mouth. Two fingers are pressed against his throat, presumably to check for his pulse. The fingers move to his wrists, and Jongdae hears frantic muttering.

They turn up the charge on the chair. Jongdae can tell because of the godawful clicking noise, and also because this time he feels his limbs seize up with electricity. He wonders if he’s bleeding into his mouth.

He also wonders why he’s not dead yet.

Two fingers are on his throat again. Then his wrist. Then more muttering, this time louder, but it doesn’t matter because Jongdae’s ears are ringing so much he wouldn’t be able to hear anything unless it was shouted through a megaphone.

The black bag is yanked off his head, and Jongdae’s eyes sting as he looks up at the warden.

“Third time’s the charm,” he blurts, feeling wetness dripping from his nose. He looks down—blood on his pants. “But can I get a tissue for this nosebleed real quick?”

Instead of a tissue, Jongdae gets a faceful of fist that has him seeing stars right before he blacks out, slumping down in the chair.

When Jongdae wakes up again, he’s no longer strapped down in an electric chair or surrounded by prison guards. In fact, he suspects he may not even be on Earth anymore.

He sits up to discover he’d been lying in a bathtub, fully clothed and in the middle of a field. He’s surrounded by brightly colored flora, and the sky above him is an almost blinding shade of blue. There’s a piece of paper on his chest as well, and he unfolds it to reveal the most cryptic message he’s ever read.

Survive.

Puzzled, he tucks the note into his pocket. Solve riddles later, explore now, he decides.

There’s a leaf still stuck on his pants as he gets up, and without thinking, he reaches down and flicks it. The moment he does, a bolt of lightning or electricity (he can’t tell which) shoots out of his fingers, striking the ground and searing a patch of grass, sending smoke into the sky.

“Oh .”

Everyone who knew Jongin in real life would say he walked around with his head in the clouds, so no one was surprised when he walked across that busy street without paying attention and ended up in the sky.

The truck that hit him was massive—Jongin had no chance. He was immediately airborne, and no one was surprised, but that changed once they realized he never fell back down. There were many theories that cropped up afterwards, and some still think it was a mass hallucination caused by the sweltering heat of the day.

Which might be plausible if Jongin had ever showed up again, but he remained missing. And in his absence, he became more famous that he could’ve ever imagined.

“He disappeared into thin air,” eyewitnesses claim. “It was like someone snatched him right out of the sky.”

As for Jongin himself, imagine his surprise when he finds himself suddenly in the streets of Beijing, China. And then, a week later, in Dubai. Three days after that, London, right inside the face of Big Ben.

“He’s a living ghost,” the papers say.

He first reads the headline in a café just outside of Barcelona. It’s odd to read about yourself in the paper, he finds, to hear people he doesn’t know spin tales about how well they knew him.

He leaves the paper on the table as he exits the cafe, sun hitting him on the back and spreading warmth through him. Jongin glances down at his hands, rubbing them together, absentmindedly wondering if he really was dead.

Suddenly, he’s pulled into an alley where a damp cloth is pressed against his nose and mouth. The smell of chloroform seeps into his body, and as someone ties his hands and feet together, he catches a snippet of their conversation.

“We found him.” 

Jongin has been dead for a week now.

He passes the time by wandering around empty buildings, wondering if anything interesting will ever happen in the afterlife. He still carries around the slip of paper he woke up with, always turning it over in his fingers, hoping in vain that it’ll reveal something else to him. Something more easily interpreted, perhaps not as vague as “Time Limit: 1hr.”

It’s been more than an hour, he’s sure, and not a single thing has happened.

The paper is thin now, creases etched in from all the folding and unfolding Jongin’s done to it. Oils from his fingers means the words are smudged too, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget them.

His wandering pays off when he discovers a thin, dark book in one of the buildings. There’s a triangle on the front, and underneath it the words Space Movement: Level 1. Jongin sits down on the floor to read it, nervous fingers fiddling with his note as he opens the book.

Realization sinks in as he reads, and for the first time in weeks Jongin disappears again.

He blinks back into existence in the forest, perched precariously on a tall branch. His heartbeat thrums in his ears as the ground below him rumbles, and as he looks down at the ripped piece of paper in his hand, adrenaline rushing through his veins, he decides once and for all: he has never been more alive.

In hindsight, Chanyeol should have kept the fires out of his apartment.

His friends would’ve advised him to keep the fires out of his life entirely, but they didn’t understand what it was like to go through your entire life desperately searching for the feeling of anything. They didn’t understand what it was like to be locked in the house by parents who were afraid of him hurting himself, and they didn’t understand the soul-crushing look in his sister’s eyes when she received her diploma, only to have mom and dad rush over to him instead as he fell out of his seat.

The bigger the fire was, the closer he was to knowing what it felt like to be burned.

He started small, of course. A magnifying glass stolen from his father’s study, held at just the right angle until the ant on the driveway was sizzling. He would watch with fascinated eyes as it squirmed uncomfortably, but somewhere along the line it wasn't enough anymore. He needed to experience it himself.

So Chanyeol started setting fires. Real ones. He’d find old things in the local junkyard, take them to the back of the skatepark, and use the lighter he’d pawned off one of the older kids.

By the time he was living in his own apartment, Chanyeol had set more fires than most people would in a lifetime. He had the burn marks to prove it, too, and everyone at the local hospital knew him by name.

The explosion that was the result of a fire and gas leak from the stove in his kitchen tore through his apartment mercilessly, sending everything into flames. It spread so fast and suddenly Chanyeol hardly had time to hide, but it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t feel the searing pain on his body anyways.

When the sprinklers , he finally noticed the skin on his hands and arms. It was an angry red, blistering and boiling, curling in on itself. He could see the bones of his hands poking through, skin dripping like melted wax onto the floor. He stumbled into the bathroom, everything around him burning, and caught a glimpse of his deformed figure in the mirror before retching into the toilet.

Even as he heaved his breakfast and lunch into the toilet bowl and watched as his skin peeled by itself, he couldn’t feel anything. The only thing he could feel was disappointment.

He passes out shortly after he hears the sound of sirens in the distance.

All things considered, Chanyeol really should’ve kept the fires out of his apartment.

The first thing Chanyeol sees when he wakes up is darkness. A black expanse above him, spreading far into the corners of his vision until he sits up and realizes he’s in an underground parking lot of some sort.

The second thing Chanyeol sees is his hands, skin smooth and unblemished. Even his clothes are normal again, no longer burnt or missing pieces. He screams and suddenly fire sprouts from his fingertips, engulfing his entire body again.

Chanyeol leaps up from the ground, tearing off his shirt to stamp out the fire that’s sticking to his skin, and discovers too late the third thing: a piece of paper, now burnt and illegible save for four words: “You are here because”.

The world has been pitch black for days now, and Baekhyun thinks he might be going crazy. A little part of him yells that he shouldn’t have gone cave-diving with his friends for the weekend, but how was he supposed to know that all their equipment would malfunction, leaving them stranded in darkness with no end in sight?

On the third day, their flashlights had run out and Baekhyun had slipped on a rock, hitting his head and passing out. When he came to, his friends were hovering around him, talking quietly.

“Are we still in the cave?”

“Baekhyun, you’re up. Thank god.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Neither can we. There’s literally no light down here.”

Baekhyun had never been afraid of the dark, but there was something about being stuck in a cave without any light that chilled him to his bones. He lost all sense of time, sleeping only when he was tired and trekking forward the rest of the time. For all he knew, they could’ve been going in circles the entire time.

The darkness wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was when they started running out of food and other supplies, because that’s when everyone began turning on each other and splitting up.

Baekhyun felt like he was in a nightmare as their screams echoed throughout the cave, harsh and loud until everything was silent.

He wasn’t sure what had happened until he stumbled across an awful, putrid smell.

“Baekhyun?” One of his friends called out to him and he stopped in his tracks.

“What are you doing? What’s that smell? Where are the other three?”

There’s a long pause before anyone answers him.

“I found a dead animal. I don’t know what it is, but I figured..since we have no food left…Do you want any?”

Baekhyun feels the hairs on his arms stand up, his gut turning. The rancid stench of flesh envelops him and he has to work overtime to keep what little food he has in his stomach down. The smell of metal mixes with the faint scent of flowers he knows one of his friends uses as perfume.

“N-No,” he mutters, “I’m good.”

He waits until his friend is asleep before he moves again. Silently, Baekhyun crawls over to him, spare t-shirt wrapped around his hands. He hovers over his body, hands ghosting up until they reach his neck. There’s a single sickening crunch before it’s over.

He knows the dead, half-eaten body beside them isn’t an animal. The only animals in this cave were him and his friends.

Some time later, he finds another body. It smells salty, face wet with something Baekhyun presumed to be tears as he checked for a pulse. Nothing.

It went on like that for a long time, the bodies piling up until Baekhyun realized he was the only one left, the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth being the weight of his backpack on his shoulders.

He hardly moved now. It was his body’s way of protecting him, and he spent hours curled in on himself, drifting in and out of sleep as his stomach begged for anything to eat.

When he hears the thrum of a helicopter, his body reacts before his mind can even process the sound.

Light shines into the cave as he moves around blindly, a rescue team dropping down and bringing him back up to the surface. As he sits in the ambulance, blanket wrapped around his body and medical personnel swarming around him, he feels his stomach drop.

He can feel the sun on his face as he turns towards it, eyes opened wide. His hand shakes as he brings it up to hold in front of his face, and the last of his energy leaves his body in the form of tears as he realizes the world is still pitch black.

“I can’t see anything,” he chokes out, blinking his eyes rapidly. “I can’t see.”

Baekhyun has no idea where he is. He knows he’s not in a hospital—the smell of death and disease is no longer assaulting his nose, and he’s no longer hooked up to machines.

There’s a piece of paper on his chest he couldn’t read even if he wanted to. He runs his fingers over the small bumps, feeling increasingly frustrated at his helplessness.

Shoving the paper into his back pocket, Baekhyun brings his knees to his chest, a dull ache humming in his chest. He closes his eyes, imagining the smell of dead flesh and flowers as flashes of color dance behind his eyelids, taunting him by showing him a glimpse of the world he would never be able to see again.

He’s so caught up in his own self-pity that he doesn’t notice the faint, hazy glow outlining his body, visible even to blind eyes.

The ocean is cold again today. Wind blows past Junmyeon as he digs his toes into the sand, woolen blanket tugged tight around his chilled frame. He takes shallow breaths, knowing somewhere in the back of his head that the salt-infused breeze would do his lungs no good.

Junmyeon moved to a beach house two weeks ago, after selling his apartment in the city and most of his belongings. He was too ill to continue his old lifestyle, he told his family and friends, and had since become a total recluse. He spent his days on the shore, staring out into the horizon with dull eyes.

He had suffered from a bout of pneumonia back in his childhood, recovered, and went on to be healthy for years until his pneumonia returned with more strength. Nowadays, it’s completely taken over his life, he feels, and the only thing that ever brings him peace anymore is the sea.

The wind shifts and Junmyeon shakes, clutching the fabric of his shirt, chest heaving as he breaks out into a terrible cough, keeling over. Mucus, blood, and spit drip from his mouth as coughs rack his body. His fingers grapple for purchase in the sand, eyes screwing shut as the wind howls in his ears.

He can’t catch his breath in between hacking his lungs out, and the blanket slips from his shoulders as they shake. Junmyeon doesn’t know how long the fit lasts before he passes out, facedown in the sand and blanket pooled around his legs.

The tide rolls in half an hour later, lapping at his ears until it reaches his shoulders, rushing through his nose into his lungs and drowning him.

Today is the day. The day Junmyeon resorts to following instructions from a piece of paper in a shallow attempt to search for answers.

“Swim,” the paper suggests, but Junmyeon isn’t so sure about that. After all, the last time he came into contact with water he drowned.

That’s what he thinks happened, anyways. It’s a bit hard to tell, considering he currently seems very much alive. Then again, this strange saturated world he’s found himself in could very well be the afterlife. His mind swims with different trains of though as his feet take him to the same place he’s been visiting for a week now: an empty swimming pool.

He waited and waited, but not once did clouds overcast the sky and rain. He poured buckets and buckets of water into the empty pool, but each time he came back it would be dried up once more.

Junmyeon sits at the bottom of the swimming pool, feeling quite silly. He closes his eyes, imagining himself to be back at the beach, and he can almost hear the waves slowly rolling towards him. His lungs clear, and for the first time in so long he takes in a deep breath of air, feeling clarity rush into his veins.

He opens his eyes and finds himself underwater.

The party shuts down around two in the morning, ties loosened and heels in hands as everyone takes the elevator down from the roof. Kris’s manager is the last one to go.

“You should stop drinking so much,” he says wryly.

“You’re talking to an artist who’s just made a cool five million in sales tonight,” he grins, “So I think I deserve a drink or two.”

His manager chuckles, stepping into the elevator with a wave.

Kris pours himself another glass, stumbling over to the railing. The city below him sleeps soundly, and the only company he has on his rooftop are the thoughts in his head and the stars in the sky. His vision blurs as the alcohol makes its way into his system, and the floor below him seems to wobble just the slightest.

The stars in the night sky are strangely mesmerizing tonight, and Kris leans forward in an attempt to get closer. The sky is so low that he swears he could pluck the stars right out of the fabric of time and smear them onto his canvas, glitter and stardust staining his hands. He’d pay a pretty penny to dip his brush into the inky galaxy and paint in shades of forever, to give dying stars a new life on Earth.

Alcohol running through his veins and burning until he feels like his insides are liquid fire, Kris reaches up and out, fingers closing around the nearest star.

All too soon, he realizes he’s falling further and further from the sky, street lights flashing closer and closer as he plummets to the ground.

The star he thought he grabbed is just his drink in a crystal glass, and as his vision sharpens he notices it slipping out of his hands. The world melts away in neon smudges as the sky pours its universe into his being, and the last thing he sees before hitting the concrete is all the stars in the sky crashing down upon him.

For once in his life, Kris wakes up completely sober. There’s no buzz in his mind, clouding his thoughts and sending everything into slow-motion, but Kris still thinks he might’ve gone off the deep end for real this time.

He’s on a roof, but not his own, and there’s no elevator or stairs leading back into the building. Garishly colored woods surround him, and everything is painted in a shade of color he had never allowed on his palette.

A piece of paper lies next to him, and in a neat scrawl proclaims “Jump”.

Cautiously, Kris peers over the side of the building. He’s too far up, and jumping would surely result in death. He pinches himself, hard.

“Wake up, Kris,” he mumbles. “It’s just a dream.”

He sits for a long time on the edge of the roof, thinking and thinking, wondering how he got to be where he is. The paper flutters in the wind as it picks up, and without thinking Kris lunges forward to catch it.

His fingertips brush against the edge of the paper before he tips over the edge. Just as he’s about to shatter all his bones against the ground, gravity stutters and he floats, suspended in mid-air for a second before he hits the earth unharmed.