“Kai’s coming back today,” says Krystal. Daehyun looks up at her. They’re eating breakfast in McDonald’s and she’s been quiet up until now. She’s reading something on her phone. Jessica moves a little next to her and peeks at the screen from behind Krystal’s shoulder.

“Mm,” she says. “I wonder if he’s going to be depressed again.”

Daehyun lets out an annoyed grunt and takes a very angry sip of coke. Jessica snorts.

“Don’t be erted,” Krystal says to her, her voice a bit distracted. Daehyun snaps his eyes up at Jessica to see her looking at him in amusement. “Not everything is about d—“

“Hey guys!” a voice booms next to them. Tao shows up next to their table, and quickly sits down next to Daehyun, who wiggles around to make some more room. “I’m so hungry. Where’s my food?”

“Here,” Krystal says, putting her phone down and grabbing the right bag. She slides it towards Tao, and he outwardly giggles. Like a schoolgirl. “Don’t they feed you at home?”

“Not when they’re away,” Tao says, taking fries out of the bag first. Then he looks around for the dipping sauce.

“You could’ve just gone grocery shopping,” Jessica reminds him, frowning slightly. Tao sends her a deadpan look.

“Do I look like someone who can do his own grocery shopping?” he asks, dead-serious. Jessica closes with a click and looks like she’s about to either laugh in his face or seriously think about his question. Her expression is then a mixture of both amusement and consideration.

“Adulting can be hard,” Krystal says, looking at Tao sympathetically. “What time are they coming back?”

“They should be here soon, actually,” Tao mutters, glancing at his wristwatch. “Though knowing Kai, he’s gonna be all slow and hesitant and cranky about leaving.”

Daehyun pretends to vomit. Jessica kicks him under the table, and Daehyun flails around, screaming in pain once. Everybody looks at their table, sending them surprised or scolding looks, and Daehyun is very close to flipping his sister off.

“You’re such a dip sometimes, Jess,” he hisses angrily.

“Just because you have the hots for Kai doesn’t mean you should be an to him and Dal,” Jessica says, leaning towards him and pointing an accusing finger at him. “It’s rude and you know it.”

“I’m not being an to them, I just find it sickeningly annoying!” Daehyun shoots back. “I hate to see him sulky and depressed just because she’s away. Soul bond or not, it’s unhealthy. Nobody should be so dependent on another person.”

“I don’t think he’s dependent on her,” Krystal butts in. “I just think that he misses her a lot.”

“Blergh.”

“You’re impossible,” Jessica says, rolling her eyes at him.

“Yeah, keep on rolling your eyes, maybe you’ll find a brain back there,” Daehyun disses her, snorting out loud right after. Jessica’s face goes from annoyed to murderous, and Daehyun sees his whole life flash before his eyes. Then he gets another kick in the shin, Tao and Krystal start to complain about them, and some people actually start to shush them.

“I do not want to be forbidden from this McDonald’s!” Tao shouts. “Not McDonald’s!”

A scuffle begins for good, and just as Daehyun is about to grab Jessica by her hair, they hear an explosion.

The ground shakes a little and everyone freezes. Some people let out surprised gasps and single shouts. The Jungs and Tao all snap their heads at the direction of the sound, almost plastering their faces to the window to see what’s going on. After a while, they spot smoke flying up into the air.

“Where is that?” Krystal asks, grabbing her phone and putting it inside her bag.

Before anyone can answer her, Tao runs out of the building, leaving them a bit disoriented. Jessica whips her head around after him. “Tao!” she shouts, but the boy is already on his way towards the explosion place. Jessica looks at Daehyun, then at Krystal, and her siblings both look rigid.

“Well?” Daehyun asks. “Are we going?”

“We can’t let Tao go alone,” Jessica says. Krystal is the first one to stand up.

They run out.

*

Seon feels vibrations first, and then hears the explosion.

She whips her head around, spotting smoke surge into the sky. It’s not too far away from where she is, and she’s on a rooftop, so she can see that it’s—

The school.

“Seon,” a voice speaks up in her ear. She puts her finger to the little earphone. “It’s—“

“I know,” Seon says. “Let’s go.”

“Should I call the fire department?” Myungsoo asks her.

“Yeah,” Seon says, a bit distracted. She squints at the smoke. It’s black and thick, and there’s a lot of it.

She starts to move. The rooftops are like a playground for her; she’s great at parkour, and she’s not going to deny it. It takes her a few minutes to get halfway to the school, and then she hears some rustling and heavy feet land next to her.

“Do we know what’s going on?” Yixing asks. Seon shakes her head.

“I just heard an explosion,” she says.

Yixing hears sirens in the distance. They pick up their pace, moving on the rooftops; people on the ground start to curiously look at the smoke, whisper and talk about the explosion, and Yixing tries to pick out strands of their conversations, but nobody seems to know anything specific.

He hears a similar heartbeat and when they jump from one rooftop to another, he looks down to see Chen on the ground. Chen waves at him, and after a few seconds, he joins them in the air.

“Maeng just called me,” he says. “Said it was arson, and the person who did it is still at the gym.”

“At the gym?” Seon asks, a bit breathless. The boys haven’t broken a sweat.

“The explosion happened in the gym,” Chen explains. “There’s fire, but it’s not spreading to the school.”

They can soon spot the school building. There’s people running around, students running away from there, evacuating; police and fire department are already there, circling the burning side-building, the gym. Crowds begin to gather at the scene.

“Stop, Chen, look,” Yixing says all of a sudden, coming to a halt and yanking Chen by the collar. Chen yelps, but looks to where Yixing is pointing.

The roof of the gym is covered in smoke. It swirls around it in thick clouds. Chen squints and then he sees someone in the middle of it, flames at their forearms.

“What the hell…?” he whispers.

“What is it?” Seon asks, unable to see from such a distance.

“There’s someone on the roof, they’re burning,” Yixing explains quickly. “But—it looks like the flames are…”

“Is he creating them?” Chen asks out loud. He pats Yixing’s chest and they break into a run again.

They come down and run down the street, having to elbow their way outside the crowds. They run past a few police officers, almost get caught a few times, and almost tackled to the ground by some dogs (a flash of blue werewolf eyes and they retreat, though).

The fire spreads slowly, but it still spreads. Seon, Yixing and Chen reach the police line right in front of the building, smoke thick in the air around them. Their eyes water immediately. In front of them, the gym’s walls are cracking from the fire. Two fire trucks are on the sides of it, and there’s firemen putting out the fire with their huge hoses.

“Oh no,” Yixing says, his face paling. Seon looks up at him, alerted.

“What?”

Yixing’s eyes are scanning the area. His hands clench around the police line in front of them, and then he says, breathlessly, “There’s someone inside.”

He takes off, and Chen doesn’t waste his time – he takes off as well. Seon is a bit slower, but she ducks under the police tape and runs. Firemen, policemen and people around them all start shouting at them, but they’re quick and swift enough to avoid them all – the firemen are too busy with the water, and the cops don’t even notice them on time. Nobody expected anyone to actually come running into a burning building.

Seon sees Yixing jump up and curl into a ball, with his arms crossed in front of his face and torso, and then the boy falls into the building through a window, glass around him breaking. Smoke explodes around him, getting out of the window in huge puffs.

“Seon!” she hears. She recognizes Myungsoo’s voice, but she doesn’t pay attention to him. Chen jumps into the building after Yixing, and then it’s her turn. She lifts her legs, her feet tearing off the ground, and jumps in. Smoke hits her eyes, throat and nose, and heat washes over her. She gets dizzy from it all, and she barely manages to land swiftly; there’s hands steading her, and when she opens her eyes, Chen is looking at her.

“You should’ve stayed outside,” he says angrily, taking off.

She follows him, smoke thick around her. She can’t see much because of it, but she can see the walls around her flaming; the floor beneath her feet is black. The gym is big, and mostly empty inside, so the majority of the fire is surrounding them and burning the walls, but it’s smoke that usually kills, not the fire alone.

“The roof is going to collapse soon!” Yixing screams from somewhere. His voice is dulled by the smoke and fire cracking, but still sharp. “We need to get out of here, fast!”

The smoke thickens around them. Chen suddenly grabs Seon’s hand, to keep her close just in case, and they head for the lockers, where Yixing and Chen can hear someone screaming. Well, at this point, it doesn’t really sound like screaming; it’s more like panicked wheezing.

Yixing tears the locker room’s door off its hinges, and fire literally bursts out into his face. He screams, coughing loudly.

“This was a bad idea,” Chen says.

Everything around them is orange from the fire. They’re in the corridor right now, flames close to them, at their skin.

Yixing enters the locker room.

The fire is everywhere there; it’s set on clothes, lockers, walls, even the floor. There’s a tiny voice heard in the bathroom, and someone is knocking at the door from inside. Once they get closer, they understand why that someone couldn’t get out – there’s a locker in front of it. It probably fell when the fire started, and is now successfully barricading the door.

Just when Yixing’s about to kick it to the side, flames burst into his face once again, and he reacts by whirling around on his heels. He feels his skin burn, and he can smell the scent of his flesh—

And then the fire around him suddenly disappears.

A whiff of air hits him, and the fire is gone from around him. He opens his eyes to fresh air, but the fire is still cracking around him, the smoke stills tings his eyes. He looks back and sees Jessica.

The girl is covered in black coal, but the fire doesn’t seem to have caught her at all. She has her arms raised in the air, hands shaped into claws, and she’s staring at something beside Yixing.

He looks to where her eyes are pinned, and sees a huge ball of fire just hanging in the air.

Right, he thinks. Jessica can control fire.

She took the fire from the locker room and made a ball out of it.

He doesn’t waste any more time – he kicks the locker out of the way, and he yanks at the bathroom’s doorknob. A girl falls into his arms, unconscious; she’s probably been knocking at the door all this time and lost consciousness still leaning over it.

“Chen,” he says. Chen shows up at his side, takes the girl, and places her on Yixing’s back. Yixing makes sure she won’t slide off.

“Quickly,” Jessica hisses, her eyes red and bloodshot. The veins in her arms are visible, sticking out; the ones in her neck as well. She’s breathless, teary-eyed, and exhausted.

They all run out of the bathroom, and once they’re out, Jessica begins to pull her hands closer. The closer her hands get, the louder she screams, feeling pain of extortion filling her. The ball of fire that she’s created, the fire that she’s literally taken from the walls and the ceiling and the floor, is getting smaller. She’s trying to put it out completely.

She clasps her hands together, veins inside her body screaming.

The ball gets small and disappears altogether, in a blink of an eye, and a wave of heat hits her. A pulsing kind of magic makes her body tilt back, and she’d have fallen down, if it wasn’t for someone having her back.

She almost collapses. Her head spins from all the force she had to use, and her head is aching; she can barely see.

“Can you stand?” a female voice asks her. She nods. Seon grabs her arm and throws it over her shoulders, propping Jessica on her back.

“Come on,” Chen says, motioning for them to move; the fire around them is smaller now. Jessica put some of it out on their way. “The ceiling—“

There’s a loud crack then. Jessica shouts when she sees the ceiling above her head crash, and she braces for impact. Seon pulls her closer, shielding her with her own body, but the impact never comes.

They’re all on the floor, crouching down. Seon is trying to protect Jessica, Yixing has pulled the unconscious girl off his back and is holding her close to his chest, shielding her, and Chen has huddled over Seon’s and Jessica’s forms, like an umbrella.

But when they open their eyes, they see the light of day. The smoke is whirling around them, now in soft puffs, and the ceiling above them is gone, a big chunk of it completely disappeared.

“What—?” Jessica says, raising her head.

She sees Daehyun, with his hands outstretched towards them all. Tao is next to him, looking smug.

“That’s it, I’m officially the new hero,” Daehyun says with a huge smile. He puts his hands down.

Jessica looks around in search of the chunks of ceiling that almost hit them, and sees that a few feet away from herself. She then looks up at Daehyun, a smile creeping up on her face, and Daehyun beams at her.

He used his power of apportation to move the falling ceiling pieces away from them. It all fell away from them, not hurting anyone.

Another explosion is heard them. It comes from the roof, but far away from them; the ground shakes. Daehyun almost falls flat on his .  

“Let’s get out of here,” Yixing proposes, lifting the girl off the ground. Chen walks over to the nearest wall and pats it down; then he clenches his fist and punches. The wall crumbles, chunks of it hitting him in the face. Once he has a small hole in front of his face, he grabs at it, pulling bricks out of it. He kicks and punches, and before they know it, they see the light.

They also see three firemen staring at them, dumbfounded.

(They don’t blame them. They just saw Chen punch a hole through a wall, after all.)

At first, Chen only stares at them. He didn’t expect to see them here. “Oh, the adrenaline!” he screams, loud enough for everyone to hear him, and dramatically enough to make Yixing and Seon snort at him.

They all stumble out of the building, the firemen immediately coming to help them and calling for paramedics. They get swarmed by them. There’s voices, light directed in their faces, and oxygen masks closing around their mouths; they all welcome them.

Jessica’s state is probably the worst out of them all; she looks like she’s inhaled a lot of smoke, but in reality, it’s the amount of the power she used that makes her look like this. Her eyes are completely bloodshot.

“So unattractive,” Daehyun mutters to her, smirking. Jessica slaps him on the shoulder.

The paramedics get them out of the scene and to the ambulances parked away. Chen, Yixing, Tao and Seon manage to slip away, leaving the Jungs and the girl to their own devices. They circle the building, hide behind a tree, and try to observe the gym’s roof.

“Is he still there?” Seon asks, her voice raspy and shaky.

“I don’t think so,” Chen says, shaking his head. Yixing eyes Seon carefully. Her eyes are red and teary, and she’s wheezing.

“Seon,” he says, his hand coming around Seon’s forearm, “you should go breathe in some more oxygen.”

“I’m fine,” she says, sending him a hard look. “We need to—“

“You need to take care of yourself,” Yixing interrupts her. “You look like you’re about to throw up.”

*

 

Krystal watched as Daehyun and Jessica ran into the burning gym, and now she watches as the side of the building collapses. Her heart is hammering in her chest. There’s millions of thoughts tearing inside her own mind; they sound like a never-ending rattle. She can’t even make words out of them. There’s a crowd of people around her.

“Krystal,” someone says suddenly. She jumps at the voice; she turns to get an eyeful of Myungsoo, who gets pushed by someone behind him. He collapses onto her, grabbing her shoulders to stop them both from falling over. “Where’s Seon? Have you seen her?”

“No,” Krystal says, shaking her head. Myungsoo looks okay; he’s worried, though. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yes,” Myungsoo assures, nodding enthusiastically. “But I lost Seon.”

“Was she with Yixing?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.”

Myungsoo’s face does a thing. He looks like he’s thinking ‘oh, yeah, right!’ and then he takes a step back, shakes his whole body, and jumps in place a few times, nerves speaking through him.

And then Krystal’s head aches. It’s a sharp, sudden pain, one that makes her hiss and whip her head around. She puts her hands over her ears protectively, shutting her eyes. She hears a single voice. Somehow, she can hear it despite all the chatter she can hear from other people’s heads. It tears through her mind. She doesn’t hear words, she doesn’t see any memories or thought, but she knows that it’s a thought. That someone is thinking at her right now. They’re not thinking in words or images, though; it’s more like a signal.

She looks up at the gym’s roof and sees a silhouette on the edge of it.

Once her eyes lay on that person, she feels utter hopelessness, panic, and fear. Scents burning bodies. Her stomach churns, and she falls onto her knees, Myungsoo trying to catch her. His hands curl around her arms, keeping her upright even as she’s crouching down. Her eyes are pinned to the person on the rooftop.

The person’s fear disappears. It gets replaced by emptiness. Their mind is clear, they aren’t thinking.

And then they jump.

A second before their body touches the ground, their mind comes back; and Krystal feel like she’s the one dying.

Guys look what toniluv made for me!

I love it so much :') I love it when you guys make stuff for me. IT'S SO NICE 

She also sent me this video, which perfectly shows how a female Kai would run XD I honestly laughed so hard at it?? I'm a movie maniac and yet I haven't seen it, urgh. 

Go thank her for this gem.

And by the way, sorry if I haven't been very active lately (aside from the updates). I'm on vacation and I've been driving around a lot and spending time with friends/family/etc, getting my life sorted out before moving out. Because I'll be moving out. Because I got accepted into university. Have I told you that? Do you care? Nevermind, I'm alive and well XD Thanks for your neverending support for this fic (and other works of mine). As always, you're the most awesome and I love you <3