“Please make yourself comfortable…” Soojung mumbled, as she led the man from the hospital into her house.

Soojung could not have let the doctors send the man to a homeless rehabilitation center. She’d been there before to help distribute food donations, and had been appalled at the conditions in which the mentally ill people lived, because on top of their illnesses, they were homeless, with no money and no family. The man she’d found in front of her house did not seem like he belonged there. He was too clean, his skin was too untainted, and despite what the doctors had claimed, Soojung was certain that the man had no mental illnesses. A suicide attempt does not mean a person is mentally ill, Soojung thought. It could just mean that he is going through a troubled time in his life. Soojung knew all too well what that was like.

Coincidentally, Soojung’s parents and her younger brother were all visiting Soojung’s grandparents on her mother’s side in the country. She was now alone in her own house, with the man, wandering about in her living room.

He had a distinct frown on his brow, and seemed deep in thought. He paced here and there, dodging the furniture around him. Soojung wouldn’t be able to tell if he was just trying to come up with another suicide attempt, she realized. She may not know who he is and why she brought him to her house in the first place, but she did know that she had to stop him at all costs, from trying to kill himself.

“Excuse me, could I talk to you?” She asked. The man looked up, and Soojung pointed to the kitchen. The man sighed, following Soojung.

“Who are you?” she said, sitting across from the man at her family’s dining table. The man looked at her blankly.

“Why didn’t you tell the doctors who you were? I’m sure you have a name, at least. Why wouldn’t you tell them? Will you tell me?”

The man blinked at her. He seemed to be studying her and her words, almost as if she were speaking a foreign language.

Soojung tried to maintain her calm, keeping her voice steady. “What happened to you when I found you on the street? Where did you come from, and how did you end up there, unconscious?”

The conversation was painfully one-sided, Soojung thought to herself. “Why did you try to kill yourself, back at the hospital?”

At that, the man’s eyes lit up. He tilted his head, then cleared his throat. “You think I tried to kill myself?” he said. His voice was thin and clear; it made Soojung think unconsciously that it would be a nice, soft singing voice.

Shaking the random thought aside, Soojung suppressed the relief rising inside her from the man’s response. “I do think you tried to kill yourself. What else would you have been doing on the ledge of a rooftop? It’s not like you were going to grow wings and fly away,” Soojung remarked, trying to coerce an explanation from the man.

For a moment, he blinked at her, as if she’d just discovered a deep secret of his. “So that’s why…” he mumbled under his breath.

“What?” said Soojung.

“Nothing,” the man replied.

He didn’t say any more, but Soojung needed him to explain more. What was she going to do, now that she had brought him to her home? Maybe it had been a bad idea. But she felt that she was responsible for this man. As if when she found him on the sidewalk, the responsibility had been handed to her. By the way he seemed to be deep in thought all the time, and by the way he refused to tell her anything about him, she suspected he still wanted to kill himself.

“Okay listen,” Soojung began, “I’m sure you have reasons for wanting to kill yourself. Maybe you’re going through something you think you just can’t bear. But since you won’t tell anyone who you are or what kind of problems you’re having, and since there is an official record at the hospital saying I have custody of you for the time being, I can’t let you do anything to danger your life.”

The man shook his head, as if to disagree. “Look,” he said. “You don’t know me. There’s no reason I should be here right now. Just let me go, and pretend that none of this happened.”

There was a certain hostility to his voice that angered Soojung. “Absolutely not,” she refused firmly.

He frowned at her. “Why not? Why are you trying to keep a random stranger that you have absolutely no acquaintance with, in your house?! You don’t have any business with me, whatsoever. Just let me go, and live the rest of your life!”

Soojung found herself raising her voice. “I don’t have any business with you?! Of course I have business with you!! If it hadn’t been for me finding you on the sidewalk, who knows what would’ve happened to you?? You could have woken up hours later, and just went and killed yourself, and then your life would have been completely wasted,” she argued.

The man shook his head, as if he was the one frustrated, not her. She kept telling herself, that he could only be like this. Thoughts of suicide attempt came hand in hand with aggression toward others, Soojung thought in her mind. If Soojung let this man leave her house and go where he wanted, she was simply letting a man kill himself. How could she live, knowing that?

“You don’t understand,” said the man, although it seemed as if he were speaking more to himself than to her.

“You know what, maybe I could try to understand, if you would just tell me,” Soojung responded. “But until then, you’re not allowed to leave. You’re staying until you give me an explanation. For everything.”

At that, the man stood up from his chair abruptly, and stormed out of the kitchen. Startled, Soojung followed him, but he had only gone out to the living room. She watched him as he disheveled his hair in frustration.

Gritting his teeth as he tried to figure out some sort of plan to get himself away from the human, Junmyun turned and locked eyes with the girl. Startled, the girl immediately looked away. She was sitting on the low steps that led from the kitchen to the living room. Eyes aimed toward the floor, she let out a yawn, covering in a feeble attempt to hide her tiredness from Junmyun.

She didn’t look much older than what Junmyun would be in human years, probably in the early twenties. She had swirls of long brown hair, tied loosely behind her, and clear, brown eyes. As Junmyun observed her physical features, the girl spastically shivered, undoubtedly cold in her light sweater.

Junmyun let out a sigh. He had finally decided.

“Listen,” he said, breaking the heavy silence that had fallen over the house for quite a while now, “I’ll make a deal with you. You seem kind of tired, and you probably need to go to sleep to do whatever things you need to do tomorrow. If you won’t let me leave, then that means you’re going to make me sleep here for the night, right? So let’s both just go to sleep. I’ll sleep, where ever you want me to sleep. And then, when you wake up tomorrow morning, and I’m still here, and haven’t snuck out and committed suicide like you claim I’m going to do, then that means I’m not thinking about it anymore, right? So then tomorrow morning, you let me leave. I’m pretty sure hu… I mean people who think they want to commit suicide usually can’t wait around for 12 hours or so and then carry out their plan. Does that sound fair to you?”

The girl blinked at him, taken back. But she seemed to be processing Junmyun’s suggestions, weighing out the pros and cons.

“And you promise you won’t try to sneak away in the middle of the night? You promise I’ll find you right where I left you tomorrow morning?” She asked.

“I promise,” Junmyun said, without hesitation. It was a complete white lie, but he didn’t care. She was just some human.

After a bit of silence, the girl nodded slowly. “Alright. That sounds fair. You can sleep in my brother’s room tonight. It’s upstairs, if you want to follow me…” With that, the girl led Junmyun up to the second floor of the house.

Despite what he’d said to the girl, Junmyun planned to leave in the middle of the night. He would wait until the girl was asleep, then sneak out, and fly back home. It was just rotten luck that the girl would wake up in the morning and find that he was gone. She would probably go on believing that he’d gone out and committed suicide. But that wasn’t Junmyun’s problem. He found it more and more ridiculous, the fact that he was stuck in the house of some human, who kept claiming she was protecting him from ‘wasting his life away’.

“And by the way, my name’s Soojung.”

It was 3:12am in human time. Junmyun decided, it was time to make his escape.

He hadn’t slept. Angels didn’t actually sleep; they didn’t have the same time system as humans. He had just waited there, in the room the girl – Soojung – had put him in.

He swiftly removed himself out of the bed he’d been lying on, and carefully laid his bare feet on the cold floors. He found the door and opened it as gently as possible, emitting close to no sounds. The darkness inside the house made him feel anxious about getting back home. He wondered if his friends had eventually realized that he hadn’t met them up at the end of the race. He wondered if they, or some of the other angels, were looking for him. He hadn’t even gone out looking for aoras to grant at all that day, like he was supposed to. Going out and looking for aoras to grant was already such difficult business, so why did he need to run into trouble like this on top of it?

Junmyun and his friends, considered young angels in training, had to go through a training process to earn their ranks as official angels of the heavens. A large portion of their training relied on a process in which the young angels had to go out into the human world and look for ‘aoras’. These aoras, which were most often misfortunes in human lives that kept the human world from functioning at a proper, peaceful rate, could be found when young angels sensed human distress and made invisible contact with the human suffering from the misfortune. Once the young angel became aware of the aora, he or she needed to help the human overcome the misfortune and restore a more peaceful cycle of life in the human world. When the young angels granted enough assistance to the human world through these aoras, they were transitioned into official angel statuses. How many aoras they needed to find varied per task, but the initial purpose lay in a young angel realizing his duty and role in the world through these tasks.  

Personally, Junmyun found these aoras to be very confusing. He thought back to the numerous aoras he’d detected and resolved in his few years since he’d grown out of a child’s angel stage. Each time he completed a task called for by an aora, Junmyun never seemed to feel quite satisfied in himself, for doing a good for the world. He didn’t know exactly how he did feel, but after he resolved an aora, he always ended up watching the human living out his or her better life for a week or two afterward. And it always made his wings tense and sore when he did.

Lost in both his thoughts and the darkness of the house, Junmyun paid no attention to his path in front of him. He didn’t see the obstacle in the hall, blocking his way. As his foot stepped up and came back down, it landed on a soft, organic surface that felt fleshy to the touch. Junmyun gasped in surprise as the contact of his foot with something that was clearly not the floor threw him completely off balance. His foot refused to push down further into the unknown texture below him, and his body searched for support. He wobbled, one foot on the floor and the other in the air. He felt himself falling forward against the pull of gravity. Just in the nick of time, Junmyun’s brain did the only thing it could do to stop him from falling: his white wings expanded out abruptly and confidently from his back, rebalancing Junmyun’s body in midair, his upper torso caught still at an almost one-fifty degree angle.

His wings stretched from one end of the hall to the other, almost touching the walls. With a hugh sigh of relief, Junmyun carefully moved his eyes below him, to see what had almost caused him to fall.

What he had stepped on was a foot. The foot belonged to the girl, Soojung. She was sleeping on the floor, wrapped in a thick wool blanket all over except for her two feet sticking out, and her head. Fortunately, the slight contact with Junmyun’s foot hadn’t woken her. She slept soundly, her breathing even and soft, her brown hair falling over her eyes.

Watching Soojung, Junmyun maneuvered his wings so that he regained balance, and was able to put his two feet back on solid floor. He refolded his wings into his back, careful not to knock any furniture in the process. And then, he found his path completely blocked by the sleeping form of Soojung, right in the middle of the hall, right in front of the door he’d come out of.

Why was she sleeping on…?? Before Junmyun could finish his thought, a strange sensation in his foot caught his attention. It was a familiar feeling, a mysterious tingling of his flesh…

The aora swept through his mind and body in a blur of images. Junmyun saw Soojung, smiling brightly, her face beaming with expectation and excitement. He saw images of her singing on a stage, a trembling hand holding tightly onto a microphone. He saw her singing with an older looking man sitting in front of a piano, her standing off to the side. The pictures morphed so that he then saw a man in his early forties, with slick black hair and a recognizably foul smirk to his face. Soojung talking to the second man, shaking his hand in his office. Then, Soojung handing him human money in an envelope. The man smirking at Soojung devilishly. Images of Soojung returning to the man’s office, to find him gone. Soojung crying human tears, her eyes red and puffy, while two other people – whom Junmyun understood to be her parents – yelled at her. Soojung crying again, alone this time, in a dark stairway.

The force of the aora caused a powerful breeze inside the house, even though no windows were open. Junmyun’s hairs rushed upward, while the aora traveled through him, then left him, just like that. With the images and the mysterious wind gone, Junmyun was again left standing in the darkness of Soojung’s house. She was still sleeping below him.

It felt odd, to discover the aora of a human Junmyun had already previously met. He didn’t know for sure, but he felt that because he already knew her to an extent, he had been forced to focus on her in the images of the aora, rather than the misfortune that he needed to treat.

For a moment, Junmyun considered just leaving the house anyway, as he had planned. Technically, he hadn’t found this aora, like he was supposed to with all other aoras. He had stumbled onto it by accident. Literally. If he left and let some other young angel come find Soojung’s aora… he didn’t know what would happen.

He couldn’t tear his gaze away from her sleeping face, partially hidden by her hair falling over her. And he couldn’t stop the last image he’d seen in the aora, the image of her crying alone in the stairway, from resurfacing in his mind. The stairway she had been sitting in strangely reminded him of the stairs he’d taken back at the hospital, when he was trying to escape.

He could have easily stepped over Soojung’s body and left the house. But Junmyun found himself turning, and going back into the room she had put him in. Her brother’s room, she’d said.

Junmyun lay back in the bed in the room. He tried to distract his thoughts from the aora. He thought about what it feels like for humans to sleep, to have to sleep each night. And then, he remembered how he’d ‘slept’ after he got struck by the lightning. He couldn’t remember anything. Only that he had been unconscious of everything and anything around him, for a period of time. And the voice. Soojung’s voice.

What it felt like to be human. Those thoughts seemed to claw at the back of Junmyun’s mind, always. He didn’t know if this was normal for all young angels. He hoped so. If not, he wouldn’t feel comfortable letting the thoughts overwhelm him so much. But he always did.

For a while now, Junmyun had had his eyes closed, lying on the bed until daylight had seeped into the room through the windows, and warm sunlight had tickled the edges of his face.

There had been so much to think about. The time he’d spent lying on the bed, waiting for morning, had been a good time to think about it all. He’d made some decisions; others, he’d tried to push away.

He knew that because he had chosen to stay last night, he had to now help Soojung with her aora. But treating this aora was different from all of the past aoras Junmyun had come across. This time, he was now visible to the human. He was not able to exercise his powers fully, for fear of the human discovering his identity. He didn’t know how exactly he could treat the aora, without revealing to the girl that he had powers to do so.

Normally, angels were always hidden from human vision whenever they came down to the human world. All angels, no matter what age, no matter what their task was, unless they chose to or had to reveal themselves to the humans, could not be seen. It didn’t make sense, how Soojung found Junmyun after he fell from the sky. How was it that even now, he was there in Soojung’s house, because she could see him and refused to let him leave?

And he had to decide how he was going to approach the issue at hand. He had told Soojung that if she found him where she left him in the morning, then she was to let him go his way. But now, Junmyun needed to stay where Soojung was, so he could figure out how to treat her aora. How he was going to do that, exactly, he had no idea. But he needed to figure it out fast, before she…

The click of the door opening disrupted Junmyun’s thoughts, and he lay there, eyes closed, completely still. He felt light footsteps entering the room, followed by a sigh.

“Um, are you awake?” Soojung’s voice asked tentatively.

Junmyun poked one of his eyes open, to see Soojung standing over him, with an odd look on her face. Why did she look.. scared? Junmyun popped open both of his eyes, and sat up in one quick motion.

Soojung stepped back a few feet, startled by Junmyun’s sudden movement, then regained her composure, along with her agitated look. “Umm… I have to apologize… there’s a sort of a bad situation… it’s completely my fault…”

When Soojung led Junmyun downstairs to the living room and kitchen, Junmyun was thrown completely off guard at the sight of three more humans in the house. A man and a woman, who both seemed to be in their sixties, and a human boy, as tall as Junmyun’s shoulders. The man wore an expression that made Junmyun understand immediately the frightened look Soojung had had on her face before. The tone of his face was a bright red, and he looked about to blow up, any minute. The woman had a more reserved, but still clearly dismayed look. The boy had a clear frown on his face, distinctively resembling the face of the man, but a younger version.

“Lee Soojung! Do you mean to tell me, that this young man here, spent the night in our house?” The man bellowed, when the two had reached the bottom of the stairs. Soojung winced at the man’s loud voice.

Junmyun watched the man and the woman intensely. He hadn’t expected such a situation to come up, but now that he was here, in plain view of all of these humans, he had to take action. He was after all an angel, who was currently responsible for making this Soojung girl’s life a little better.

He began to whisper soft, inaudible words to himself, his eyes focused on the heads of the man and the woman. He didn’t focus on specificity, just willed their human brains and thoughts to approach the scene more positively. He felt the powers seep through his veins, and watched, as the woman’s expression slowly grew out from distress into a slight smile, and the man’s face lightened to a fair skin complexion.

“Oh, Soojung dear, is this young man your boyfriend?” The woman said, her voice pitched. “You never mentioned you were seeing someone before.”

“Huh?” Soojung uttered.

“Pardon me,” The man began, stepping forward and shifting his gaze toward Junmyun, “I’m Soojung’s father. What’s your name, son?” The man held out his hand expectantly.

Junmyun had observed enough humans to recognize the man’s gesture as a request for a handshake. He held his hand out and shook the man’s hand firmly, replying, “Kim Junmyun, sir.”

Soojung turned to him with wide eyes, hung slightly ajar.

“Soojung dear! I can’t believe you didn’t introduce us to your boyfriend before! How impolite of you. He’s very handsome,” The woman remarked, giggling.

“Eh-hem,” The man coughed, turning to Soojung. “I’m still cross with the fact that you invited someone into our home for the night, without our permission, Lee Soojung. We’ll have to have a talk about this privately, later.”

“Oh, honey, be a little lenient! Junmyun, you said your name was?” The woman addressed Junmyun. “Very nice to meet you. Would you like to join us for breakfast?”

Soojung stepped out and held her hands up in exasperation, before the conversation could continue. “No! Uhh… I mean… we need to get going…”

With that, Soojung dragged Junmyun out of the house at lightning speed. Junmyun exchanged light farewells with the man and the woman, the woman, waving to him until he was out of sight from the doorway. He hadn’t completely meant for the situation to turn out that way, making Soojung’s human parents think he was her boyfriend, but he was glad that he had at least helped the girl avoid punishment. Maybe he was off to a right start in helping her, as her temporary angel.