Pain.

That’s all he felt. No rush of adrenaline flowing through his veins. No sense of being alive. No regrets. No fear. Just pain.

It wrapped around him like a scarf bound around one’s neck on a chilly day, painfully tight yet bringing a comforting warmth with it. As he hit the floor, it slipped away from him, pooling to silent tears as it mixed with the blood that leaked from his pretty head.

The shivers that once shook his skeleton-like frame ceased. Wide eyes that once shed tears far too often slowly fell shut as a final breath slipped past wind-chapped lips. No-one came to check on him. No-ones bothered to look at the dead body now lying beside the building that the young boy threw himself off.

And as his broken heart stopped beating, he finally felt at ease. 

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It still haunted him- that day. That day that Minghao stopped coming home. That day Minghao stopped never showed up to class. That day they found Minghao’s body splayed out on blood splattered tarmac, mouth held open in a silent scream.

It took a week to find his body. The building had long since been abandoned, and the entire area was generally desolate. No-one thought to look for the missing Chinese boy at the bottom of an old office block.

It was another week before they found the suicide note. Black ink smudged with now-dry tears, word after word of self-loathing forever imprinted on the sepia pages. 

It was one week later when they found Chan. His body curled up in a tight ball on the bed in Minghao’s old apartment. A single bottle of pills still lay in his open hand, the contents of which long since settled in Chan’s stomach. The only reason he gave was written on the wall in large, shaky letters, the blood they were written in a dirty brown from age.

“I couldn’t live without you, Xu Minghao.”