Yunho felt as if he were just forced through the eye of a needle, every joint in his body popping and clicking, constriction squeezing the breath of life from him. He dizzied, blurred semi-consciousness barely realising the release of his lungs as they only filled with vapour as they expanded. As quickly as this pain had come, he was plunged through the looking glass and thrown into the past he'd spied upon.

He spiralled like a plane with a broken engine through the air, arms naturally branching out at his sides. His descent slowed, triggering his befuddled mind into re-booting, questioning the lightness of his body and blown proportions of the courtyard as he levelled out in the air, harsh forces battering his arms in the most curious way. It threw off his balance, and he tensed. His flight path straightened. He was flying.

He gathered his wits above the waterless fountain, he altered his trajectory and made a curving flight towards the alert warrior, sparking Changmin's movement along a shepherded path. Changmin fled Yunho's deviant body, and Yunho wondered what on earth he must look like. He felt as if he were in a sensoreal, supernal dream. The sound of Changmin's pants and footsteps echoed around his head like a migraine, the task of flying becoming harder the longer he flapped his wings. Changmin glanced back at him, different parts of him becoming warped in Yunho's gradually unfocussing vision, as if Yunho were both close and far away, or looking through several pairs of eyes.

Changmin was herded across the roof of the building where Yunho had been taken through the window and dropped into the tower parallel. The clatter of his armour against the tiles jarred Yunho's ears, his sight continuing to deteriorate. The vibrant colours were slowly fading, like a painted wooden figure left discarded on the windowsill.

A movement down below caught his attention. To his surprise, he saw the white being, although their usually pearly aura was muted into monochrome. They seemed to be pushing around the environment, opening and closing opportunities to the forward thinking warrior who was none the wiser. As soon as Changmin saw an entry point appearing to the opposite building, he jumped for it like a leopard, with much more grace than the bumbling Yunho of one hour ago.

Yunho had a brief thought about his condition. Whatever he was, it seemed he existed within and without time, just like his watch, the beings, the birds. He'd finally become one with the world within which he resided. However... He needed to get back. There was still the matter of Changmin's glyph shard. He could not forget, for while he did not fully understand what was at stake, it was in his hands. Changmin was waiting for him on the other side.

Yunho settled on the roof, tucking his wings comfortably against his back. He saw the black being off to the side, at work just like their white counterpart, in both conjunction and opposition with one another. While he was wondering if they knew he was here, the white being briefly halted in their path to turn and look Yunho straight in the face. They smiled. They knew, alright. They always knew. The white being rolled aside a panel, exposing mechanics and a thick, viscous bubble.

Heart rate suddenly tripling, Yunho jumped and threw open his wings, diving down, weaving around the machinations of the living building, the battery of the air against his whole being exhilarating him. His whole body reacted, down to the pupils of his eyes constricting, focussed on nothing but the liquid glass which would send him back to the other side.

-----

Yunho was barely recovered from being thrown back into his own body, squeezed so unpleasantly back through the eye of the needle. When he arrived, he found the glyph shard missing in his pocket. Turning back on himself, he saw the portal where he'd fallen obstructed by the emerald green, glossy surface patterned as if it had been shattered from within. So Changmin's trinket was a token. He needed to go find his companion.

Despite being able to hold his hands in front of his face again, Yunho couldn't escape the indescribable sensation of flight, unable to shake it from his body. As he jumped from surface to surface, taking great, powerful leaps across impossible divisions, he propelled himself through space as if no anchor could chain him. However, as he became bold and his path began to snowball beyond his own speed, like running downhill, he began to lose control. His heart fluttered in both panic and elation.

He fell like a fallen angel into the chaos of the three dimensional world. A great cloud of glittering green shard dust was blasted into the air where he impacted with unshakable reality; upon the platform, made from material which cannot be broken, it was his body which shattered with the force of the impact. Yunho lay motionless where he crash landed, unable to see, to feel. In his mind's final attempts to cling to consciousness, addled noise was the only remaining thing to make it through to him. And all he could hear was...

"N-no... I'm not ready..." Changmin's voice trembled, shoulders hunching defensively as the world transformed around him, blocking off any means of escape. "I can't! Not there!" Desperation smothered his words, heart racing and eyes bulging as he scrambled away from his impending fate. His feet stuttered in a dance to evade the darkness which emerged as tile by tile collapsed away into the nothingness which had stolen their friends before them. "Yunho, don't just lay there! Get up! Why aren't you helping me?" He demanded, stumbling backwards over a plank which blocked his path. He landed with a heavy clank on the ground, lacking the energy to get back to his feet.

Yunho was in no position to help; stranded paralysed on a suspended platform, he could do nothing but listen in pure horror as Changmin pleaded for his life. "Yunho, do something!" The marble flooring crumbled below the General's legs, leaving him clinging by his arms. His eyes welled as a fleeting look of betrayal crossed his hurt expression, eyes demanding 'why?'-;

And finally, as Yunho cracked open his exhausted eyes, the last Yunho saw of the warrior was a hand- grasping at thin, thin air.

Deeply shaken, Yunho lay flat on his gently swinging platform, feeling the cold, rough wood under his cheek. He mustered the last strength in his broken body to fumble for the button on his stop watch, only to find when he pressed it, it no longer worked. His fleeting heart and uneven breaths started to squeeze hot tears from him, a deep sense of failure swelling within him, the fear of Changmin digging daggers into him. He should have saved him. Why couldn't he save Changmin?

With his eyes scrunched shut, he jumped when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. Perhaps Junsu had survived? Looking up through his hands, in which he had cradled his throbbing head, he found no such thing. In his surprise, he rolled away onto his numb back, staring with huge, bloodshot eyes up at the pied being, restored to their black and white checkered self.

"You..." He sniffed." You're back."

The being offered a kind hand, one which Yunho hesitantly took.

"Come. Let us leave this place."

Yunho stared dumbly at the being. It was the first time to hear the other's voice- so smooth, so soothing, and yet ebbing with power and command. Their touch was barely the grip of a feather, but their connection was steadfast, a pure white light born and softly growing from between their palms. Lost in the endless galaxy which swirled and glimmered behind their entrancing eyes, Yunho's heart filled with feelings indescribable, so moving his panic hushed and tears dried. He felt as if he were connected to the well of all knowledge, imbued with a sense of past, present and future, a stirring so powerful in his chest that he couldn't contain it. The prospect overwhelmed his mortal mind, unable to contain the awesome power which pulsed below his very fingertips, merely the membrane of skin protecting him from a devastating omnipresence so far beyond his comprehension, one contained within a solemn being with the silky touch of a serene water maiden.

With such an all-encompassing presence before him, Yunho couldn't possibly notice how the world around him fell into destruction, materials flying in a raging tornado around them, eventually disappearing in the ever growing white light which was nurtured by the connection of their hands. Nothing was left but endless white, so dazzling Yunho would be unable to look anywhere by the being before him, who in this ethereal world protected him all along.

The broken stopwatch discarded began to burn white hot. It lifted from his possession by itself, returning to its master's outstretched hand above their joined ones. The chain twisted around their wrists, linking them with a heat so intense Yunho couldn't feel it burning against his flesh.

The watch was empty on the inside. All that was left was the delicate shell, a crystal white inside.

“You have completed the cycle. Thank you.”

Their mellow voice rang in the silence.

Yunho finally brought himself to say something, voice barely beyond a breathy whisper. "Where am I? And where are my friends?"

“Here, nothing and everything exists. What exists here is your soul, manifested in your earthly capsules. We are all and neither. Sadly the earthly realm is not so simple.”

While Yunho felt as if he shouldn't be able to comprehend those words, rather than processing through his mind they entered his heart.

Yunho asked again.

"What really brought us here?"

“Twas fate; twas I.”

-----

The soft, monotonous beep of a pulse monitor was the first thing Yunho began to notice in the darkness that surrounded him. His body was entirely stiff, as if it were not his own and it resisted his spirit. Although he felt as if he'd just awoken from a deep, powerful sleep, he felt utterly shattered. He drifted in and out of consciousness in both sleep and loss of stamina for many more times than he could count, the only thing he could percieve in his waking moments the beep, beep, beep.

He felt something cold wrap around his motionless hand, linking with his fingers in a tight squeeze. Somebody was holding him, waiting patiently for him to come back to them. He didn't feel ready. He still couldn't move, but he could hear. This person, with soft, cold hands and a sense of anticipation around them, began to talk to him.

They didn't know if he could hear them, but they wanted him to wake up soon. They asked if Yunho remembered their last visit, when they updated him on what's been happening in the neighborhood recently. Half way through their rather unconfident monologue, they seemed to lose purpose and berated themselves for waffling so rediculously. Even when Yunho was asleep they couldn't talk to him properly, it seemed, they had observed. Yunho wondered why they sounded so meloncholy.

Every time Yunho woke up, he felt a little stronger inside. He couldn't feel much yet but he knew he was fighting a winning battle. Eventually, he felt the strength to squint open his eyes. The light around him blurred his vision beyond comprehension, but judging by the whiteness and the sterile smell of the room he was in, and the consistent beeps of the monitor, Yunho had long been able to tell he was in the hospital. Why he was there, had longer remained a mystery- that is, until this afternoon.

"Yunho, we lost." He heard the voice say. He kept his eyes closed; he could sense they were finding it hard even to talk to his corpse-like state, so he wasn't going to interrupt. "We couldn't charge the driver who hit you so severely. She wasn't drunk, she as the only witness said you ran in front of her, it was night and oh Yunho... I don't know what to say, as usual. Are you there? The doctors tell me you seem to have come out of your coma, but you're still not in a state to stay awake for long. I haven't managed to catch you all there, yet. Won't you open your eyes?"

The voice was so familiar; yes, he knew who it was, of course from the start- but she sounded so soft, so unlike how he usually encountered her.

He gathered his energy and opened his eyes to squint at the blurred woman. Despite not entirely being able to see her, even the fuzzy colours of her clothes gave her away. It was his mother. And she was delighted to see the colour of his eyes after all this time.

-----

"Don't hold their beings down to the realm they do not belong, Yunho. The souls of our fellow heroes need to be released. They do not belong to the earthly realm, for they have no earthly vessel to return to." The being had said. It was difficult to let them go just like that, but he understood. None of them belonged here, wherever 'here' was.

Yunho, in his bedridden state, had a lot of time to ponder on his otherworldly experiences. He could now sit up in bed, most of the bones and organs in his torso in a less fragile state than before, and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of visitors he accrued. Before he left the alternate world, he'd probed into the meaning of his role, not extracting much but some abstract speech on the balance being restored.

However, he did manage to scrounge one nugget of information he was sure he'd never soon forget; the being's name: Jaejoong.