The mouse’s eyes fluttered shut from inside the gas chamber and Yesung reached in to pick it up. It lay limp and still in his hand, though its heart could still be seen beating in its chest. To be sure it was completely sedated, he pinched its foot. There was no reaction.

“I’d prefer to do this without anesthesia, but that infernal squeaking irritates me,” the scientist murmured as he set the mouse down on the operating table and wiped its back with alcohol. He picked up the scalpel and made the first incision.

Not long after he finished implanting the cells, the mouse awoke. It whimpered in pain, eyes pleading up at him as it wondered why its body hurt so much. Make it stop, it seemed to be begging, instinctively knowing that he was the cause of it. Kill me.

But Yesung couldn’t care less what the mouse thought or felt. He had results to recover. That batch of baby mice that he had implanted with the fruit fly stem cells were now adults with full-fledged wings. Just yesterday, he had observed one of them stagger across the cage, its toes barely touching the bottom as it struggled hard with its little wings. So close. They were so close to achieving flight.

He had ignored the blood trickling from the joints where the wing met the mouse’s body.

To achieve his ultimate desired result, flight in a human, the procedure had to be more than just a success in embryos. He picked up the mouse, ignoring its faint squeaks, and set it back into the cage.

“Tell me another one,” Ryeowook begged, clinging to Zhou Mi’s sleeve.

Heechul snorted and Zhou Mi smiled indulgently. “Okay, fine. One more story and then it’s lights out for you. For both of you," he added sternly. Ryeowook nodded, while Heechul merely grunted and waved his hand dismissively.

The nurse sat back down at Ryeowook’s bedside. “Let’s see…I just told you about Peter Pan…how about Daedalus and Icarus?”

Ryeowook nodded eagerly. Ever since Dr. Kim had planted the idea of flight into his mind, he just couldn’t seem to get it out. All he ever talked about now was flying and he asked Heechul a million questions about wings and how they worked, much to the older man’s irritation.

“I don’t give a about birds and bugs and their ing wings,” Heechul had snapped, putting an end to the discussions.

The doctors found it an odd topic for him to have taken such a sudden interest in, but the new, talkative, and excited Ryeowook was a positive change from the apathetic patient he had been. “Indulge him,” Hangeng had instructed Zhou Mi in a quiet voice that Ryeowook had managed to overhear. “Maybe this is just his way of finally accepting things.”

“So, let’s see…Daedalus and Icarus.” Zhou Mi rubbed his chin and glanced at the clock. Ryeowook knew it was getting late, but he wasn’t tired at all. “Well, there was once a great inventor named Daedalus, who worked for an evil king. To keep the inventor’s genius to himself, the king locked Daedalus up in a high tower, where he lived with his son, Icarus. Daedalus longed to escape his prison and spent many hours studying the flight patterns of birds and collecting feathers from the ones that passed by his room.

“One day, Daedalus decided to help a hero complete a great quest to slay a monster, and for that, the king sentenced him to death. By that time, Daedalus had collected enough feathers to construct two pairs of wings, held together with wax.”

“Must have been a hell of a lot of birds,” Heechul murmured, but he was listening intently as well.

“When Daedalus heard that the soldiers were coming to arrest him, he and Icarus strapped on their wings and leapt from the tower.

Ryeowook smiled as he imagined how they felt the moment they began to fall, only to be suddenly caught and lifted up again into the air. He envisioned the astonished looks on the soldiers’ faces, as they gaped and pointed at the two humans soaring through the air, free. Liberated.

“Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus, thrilled with his new ability, paid no attention to his father. He began flying higher and higher, and the heat of the sun began to melt the wax that held his wings together. His wings came apart, and he plunged to his death in the sea.”

Heechul scowled at that. “Crappy ending,” he muttered, pulling his covers up to his shoulders and turning away.

But Ryeowook hadn’t heard a word about Icarus’s folly. He was still dreaming, imagining himself dipping and twirling through the air alongside the ancient Greek inventor and his son, his own wings spread wide to catch the thermals. The sun warming his face, the wind ruffling through his hair-

“Sorry this one isn’t a happy story, Ryeowook,” Zhou Mi said softly, taking the boy’s silence for horror. He tucked the boy in bed and turned off his lights. “But it just goes to show one important lesson.

“Humans weren’t meant to fly.”

On the fifth day, Yesung noticed the glistening appendages lying flat on the mouse’s back. The creature had grown thinner with each passing day; it had stopped eating and drinking altogether, but Yesung paid no attention. All of that was irrelevant to the experiment.

Setting up a lamp, he placed the mouse underneath it and turned up the heat, careful not to disturb its new wings. Slowly, the wings began to dry and the mouse began to stir. The mouse raised its head and sniffed at this strange source of light. Warmth…comfort…it curled up into a ball, exposing its wings to the lamp.

Minutes ticked by, then hours, and still, Yesung sat there, waiting. Bit by bit, the moisture evaporated from the wings and they began to change from their wrinkled soggy forms. As they dried, they began to unfold and smooth out and Yesung closed his eyes in satisfaction, allowing a small smile to come to his face. Success.

While that didn’t ensure that his procedure would work in humans, he would only find out if he tried it. He got up and left the room to call Dr. Han, locking the door behind him.

The mouse with the dragonfly wings finally unclenched its body and rose to its shivering legs, twisting its head around to gaze at the unfamiliar appendages sprouting from its back. It sniffed at one, then the other.

Then it clamped its jaws around one, tearing into it with its teeth. It shrieked in pain as it realized this was part of its own body, but it attacked again. And again. What was this foreign object? It didn’t belong and the mouse knew it. Gnashing away with its teeth, it chewed the delicate membrane to pieces. Its back was burning, the pain stabbing into its body again and again, but it couldn’t stop, it had to get rid of this foreign…thing, it was wrong, it didn’t belong here-

Pretty soon, there was nothing left to show for Yesung’s hard work besides a dead mouse, lying cold in a pool of congealed blood, its shredded and ragged wings trailing from its back.

Ryeowook groggily opened its eyes. He didn’t remember anything after Yesung had jabbed a needle into his arm and told him to count backwards from ten.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Kim asked him as he yanked off the latex gloves and tossed them into the biohazard waste bin.

It was a question that Ryeowook had grown sick of hearing, but at the moment, he didn’t mind. “My back hurts,” he said hesitantly, staring down at the bandages mummifying his entire torso.

Dr. Kim smiled at him again, and Ryeowook wished he would stop doing that. There was something sinister about the man…he could feel it…

“Well, they should be ready in about a week,” Dr. Kim continued. “Take these for pain, but only if you need them. They could interfere with the growing process and we wouldn’t want that happening, would we.” Ryeowook shook his head.

The moment he was wheeled out of the operating room in his bed, his parents rushed over. “How do you feel, honey?” his mother asked.

“Soon, you won’t be needing that chair anymore,” his father added, with one of his rare smiles that made Ryeowook smile as well. He agreed with his dad, for once. Soon, he would be perfect. 

Even Sungmin had come to visit him on the day of his surgery and now, his older cousin stepped forward and lightly punched his arm. “Everything went well, right?”

Ryeowook nodded and he could see the guilt disappear a fraction from Sungmin’s eyes.

Zhou Mi and the nurse who generally took care of Heechul wheeled him back to his room and he turned towards his roommate’s bed eagerly, prepared to finally tell the truth about his surgery.

But Heechul wasn’t there. That was strange; Heechul rarely left his room, except for the occasional jaunt up to the roof for a smoke. But his need for nicotine ran like clockwork and Ryeowook knew that it was too early for his roommate to be taking a cigarette break.

Ignoring his doctor’s instructions and his nurse’s firm orders to stay in bed, Ryeowook pushed back the covers and carefully swung his legs off the side of the bed. He’d seen Heechul do this many times, but had never tried it himself. After nearly falling, he managed to settle himself into his wheelchair and poked his head through the door. No sign of Hangeng or Zhou Mi. He was safe…for now. He grasped the rims of his wheels and began pushing himself towards the elevator.

He failed the notice the spots of blood that had begun to stain his bandages.

Heechul was on the roof, as Ryeowook had expected him to be, peering over the edge as he rocked his chair back and forth to the beat of some music only he could hear. He didn’t turn around as Ryeowook came towards him.

“You know, this fall could probably kill us,” he said quietly, staring down into the street.

“Y-you’ve told me that before,” Ryeowook stammered. Heechul didn’t sound like himself. His voice was too hollow, too de- no, he couldn’t think it. “It’s almost dinnertime.”

There was no answer for the longest time, only the cold wind piercing through his hospital gown and bandages. Ryeowook shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself, wishing he’d brought a blanket with him.

“How did your surgery go?” Heechul asked finally raising his head, but still not turning around. “When can you walk again?” The familiar sardonic tone of his voice was comforting to Ryeowook.

“That’s not what happened…”

“You know it won’t work, right?”

“I know, but-”

“Then why did you do it? God, I thought you were smarter than that. Did you finally decide to listen to sweet mommy and daddy, who don’t give a about you, only your disability?”

Ryeowook trembled, faintly shaking his head and trying to explain. “No, Heechul, that’s not-”

“Why the ing hell would you agree to put yourself through something that won’t ing help? You’re getting your goddamn hopes up and you know what? You will be crushed with disappointment. Because everything is ing useless.”

“Heechul-”

“ty hospital, ing bastards…” Heechul finally turned around and Ryeowook gasped.

When had his roommate become so thin? Heechul was practically skeletal, his skin nearly translucent, his hair stringy and sparse. Oh God, how had he not noticed? Heechul must have been starving himself- how could this have happened without anyone realizing it? 

“This is what the hospital does to you, kid,” Heechul said quietly. “And as long as you continue to believe their fake promises and lies, you will never get out of here.” He spread out his arms like wings and began leaning backwards, his wheelchair tipping precariously over the edge of the roof.

“What are you doing?” Ryeowook cried.

“Leaving on my own terms, kid,” Heechul replied, a lazy grin crossing his face. “Don’t worry about it. Everything will be okay.”

The wheels slipped and the chair crashed to the ground below, but Heechul hovered in the air, arms thrown out wide with his head tossed back. His face was peaceful, his eyes closed; a crucified Jesus rising up to heaven.

Then his body exploded in black flames, the fire at his body as it consumed him. The skin crumbled right off his flesh; his hair ignited like the ends of dynamite to explode off his scalp in sparks; his bones smoldered and glowed. The wind scattered his ashes to the corners of the earth.

The eerie ensuring silence was drowned out only by Ryeowook’s screams.