When she awoke, only the heaviness of Sehun’s body above hers assured her she was still alive. Perhaps it was fear and perhaps it was trauma, but the moment she had jumped through the flames, she was numb. She liked that, the numbness of it, like a dose of anaesthesia. She sat up, so that Sehun’s head slid down to her lap, a heap of tousled hair made damp by fear.

They were in a golden wheat pasture in its prime, acres and acres that seemed to stretch to the ends of the earth.

“Where are we?” She shook Sehun, and he groaned. He would not open his eyes. Hesitantly, she laid the back of her hand on his forehead. It burned her, his blistering skin.

“Sehun, what’s wrong?” Her hand tingled with his heat. “Let me heal you.”

Sehun lay comatose as her fingers swept down his body, drawing the poison out of him. She had healed him of burning heat before, but this time was different. His fever, instead of dissipating into the blue skies, seeped through her skin, searing her instead. Then, he coughed.

Panting now, she watched as he slowly sat up, clutching his chest.

“Don’t do that again,” he said weakly, leaning against her. “You feel it, right?”

She did feel it, that tingling sense of heat, suffocating like the coils of a hot stove top. “Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” Sehun put his hand on her shoulder. The coolness of it on her skin was comforting, and she closed her eyes. Focusing on nothing but the softness of his fingers and the sound of his voice.

“Where are we?” she asked, her hands feeling the dirt around her. Even the dirt felt brittle. Like Sehun.

She knew before he said it. “This is my ghost light.”

“Ah.” There was really nothing else she could say.

“I had everything when I died,” Sehun said hurriedly. Trying to create a rhythm for her to hold on to. “Rich, talented, handsome. Well, I still am handsome.”

She smiled a little at that, the corners of lifting upward toward the sky.

“And I had a girlfriend who made all the other boys hate me like crazy.”

“Your life sounds like a fairy-tale.” That kind of life, coated with gloss like a young girl’s lips, must have been wonderful on the surface. But it also must have been as flimsy and shallow as the stories children swallowed.

“I used to believe I loved her. My girlfriend. She was golden in everybody’s eyes.” Sehun relaxed against her, feeling the pulse of his story. “We were the golden couple. We were going to get married, travel and then some. I believed it.”

“Life isn’t that perfect.” She could hear him shake his head, feel the breeze created by his swaying hair.

“Sometimes you can fool yourself into believing you’re happy.” He paused. “But she was never really happy with me. I couldn’t do anything other than hold hands with her and dream. So she found other boys. And I found them with her.”

“So she wasn’t perfect. None of us are.”

“But I was stupid and I believed she was perfect. There was no way she would have left me of her own free will. She must have been threatened, coerced, forced.” He laughed a little, a hollow sound that faded away as quickly as it came. “So of course I had to save her. One little fight. One little bullet.”

“Was it quick?” she asked.

“The bullet didn’t kill me immediately. He was a lousy shot, but good enough to make it so I couldn’t move. My girlfriend was terrified, but she loved him more than she loved me. So they hauled me into a dumpster and left.”

His hand tightened on her shoulder and his voice was faint.

“It took a long time for me to die.”