“But who prayed for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the sinner that needed it most?”
– Mark Twain

 

Taehyung is falling.

Wind in his hair and a roaring cry in his ears and he drops like south is the only direction he knows. Everything spins as he plummets from the sky away from the world he lived in until clouds dissipate apart and the sun says its farewell. He falls head-first, the universe whirling by in a blur, and he’s going down, down, down—

Taehyung is dying.

Dying, but not dead.

Inside, there is a blazing fire that threatens to turn him into ashes, flames that tickle him outwards from the spine. The heat sears his veins and little crackles of sparks burn the surface of his skin, reminding him of the sensation of having his once-pure wings ripped right off. There are two thin slits on his back and a large hole in his heart and without his faithful wings, he spirals to the ground at the mercy of gravity.

Outside, he inhales and feels himself drowning in open air. Blood gashes out from where his wings used to be, leaving behind a trail of crimson red to paint the line between angels and mortals and what lies beneath in a forbidden place. The agony is unbearable and he has lost so much blood that it shouldn’t be possible for him to still be conscious, still be alive; he wishes for the end for he has already lost his identity, lost his very existence, and who was it that decided angels should sink down from the sky?

He is a comet, a meteorite, an asteroid in the presence of the raging sun and pitiless clouds. A daytime shooting star.

His entire body pulses with pain, ripples of anger and fear and sorrow and regret clashing within him all at once. He has long since lost the ability to form coherent thoughts. Death clings to him like a hug from a long-ago friend, slender fingers wrapped tightly around his neck until he sees spots in his line of sight and begins to forget his own name, forget his senses, forget himself.

The fall is long, torturously long, but not without reason. After all, he needs time to complete his transformation.

A shift. Black inches into his vision from the corners of his eyes, dancing across his iris, and when he blinks, the world is tinted red. The hammering in his head bangs louder, louder, louder; screams lost in the wind as he finally gives in to the alluring hands of unconsciousness.

Fallen angel.

Oh, how low he’s sunk.

Iron’s metallic smell engulfs his nose and it’s so strong that he starts to go dizzy from the scent alone. The blood gushing out of his back seem to float around him now, forming the shape of two elaborate crescents, drying and solidifying into place. When they harden, it’s so natural that he feels them as if they were extensions of his own body, a colour so impure he would have argued that there is no way it could exist had he still been an angel.

They are his wings, the ones he had lost, fitting perfectly into the slits on his back. They are his wings, made of his own blood, new and undamaged and everything he never wanted.

He feels sick. But he is powerless to the change he is undergoing. A sharp sting strikes his heart because this—this is exactly what he tried not to be. He did not know before but he knows now: all along, it had been inevitable from the beginning.

It isn’t until the day switches to night that he stops falling, and when he stops, it is anything but gentle.

.

The glow of the moon seems worlds away from where he has landed, in a realm far below the mortal one. He finds that he cannot move, as if he were a statue made of stone, and he does not know how long he lies there, frozen. Hours and days and centuries pass while he is unable to even open his eyes, wondering if this is what it feels like to share an embrace with death, until—

A tingling. Soft, cotton-candy promises whispered against his lips and a hand gingerly caressing his cheek, drawing the two of them closer, closer. Oxygen returns to his system as his eyes flutter open for the first time since his fall.

The man kissing him has golden pupils and pitch black irises and a crack on his right cheek. Taehyung doesn’t need to look in a mirror to know that he has a matching one.

Broken.

They are all broken here.

His body aches all over and as he tries to take in his surroundings, he groans, the sound travelling to unknown distances. There isn’t a single light in this place and strangely, it calms him. He thinks that if he were to stand in the presence of the sun again, he would simply disintegrate.

As he sits up, his new pair of wings unfurl behind him, long spans of dark feathers replacing where his white ones used to be. They are powerful and dangerously beautiful, waiting to carry him to heights he has never reached before.  

He understands now. This is what happens when an angel, a human, a boy comes face-to-face with evil.

Hello, newborn, a voice in his head echoes, and yes, he thinks; when he fell from the sky, he had not died. He had been reborn. My name is Kim Seokjin.  

Somehow he knows that Seokjin is the man from earlier, with cold yet tender lips. Somehow, he knows that they are allies now, that he has become just like all the others here. That they have all been stripped of their former identities and abandoned their pasts.

I am Kim Taehyung, he replies back in his thoughts. And that is all he gets to say before his mind is consumed by fury. There is a ringing in his skull, the only emotion left in him being raw, raw anger. His fingers itch to bring down everything in his sight, to destroy, and the tempered restlessness building up in his veins demands to be unleashed.

He turns back to face the older man with a malicious grin on his face, one that Seokjin returns, and there is only one way to calm the raging fire burning inside of him, he knows.

Seokjin understands. Go, Taehyung. He nods curtly at him and that is all the permission he needs.

The universe is cruel because angels and demons are one and the same; Taehyung soars up from the deepest depths of hell with a strong flap of his midnight black wings and brings ruin to the world he once tried to protect.