Tell me how all this, and love too will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me how we'll never get used to it.

-Richard Siken, Crush

It begins, as all things do, with Soojin.

It comes gradually, like the crash of waves; seeps into Soojin slowly in the months before her fall, which makes it hard to pinpoint which of Soojin's many transgressions had been the final straw.

When Soojin is cast from heaven, something feels off. Miyeon isn't the first to think it. Unrest spreads in the citadel like pestilence, festering in the courtyards.

Rumor has it, the world has caught fever.

“If it was Minnie,” Shuhua asks one night, feet dangling off the ledge where she sits. Miyeon watches the gold pool beneath her wings. “Would you still want to stay?” 

In the days leading up to Shuhua’s fall, when Minnie bleeds grace too, Miyeon wonders what she’d meant.

Yet still, Miyeon doesn’t learn to keep her distance.

Minnie’s sins have stained her skin. Through her wings, gold drips. It trails over her feathers, down her shoulder blades, over the small patches where blackened streaks have yet to form.

Miyeon knows; knows that when the glamour finally fades, when her grace has been bled dry— that when Minnie leaves, nothing will change. Another angel falls, heaven catches fever. The world resets. Like clockwork.

Minnie laughs, not despite it, but because of it. And sometimes it feels like this is who she belongs with. Never where.

“Do you still want to?” she asks another night, pressing a hand into the grass. “Leave, I mean.”

But Minnie doesn’t answer, only hugs her knees closer, and leans into Miyeon’s shoulder. Miyeon doesn’t want to push for more than what she’s allowed, but Minnie isn’t one to be this quiet, and neither is she, so she poses the question.

“Are you scared?” Miyeon asks, voice softer. She feels the way Minnie shifts.

The quiet speaks maybe a beat too long.

“No.”

Minnie doesn’t say much after.

The nights pass like that, beneath the moonlit cover of the citadel, with questions asked that aren’t always answered, and ones that are never uttered. Those nights, Miyeon doesn’t pry.

But there are nights when Miyeon feels bold. On those nights, Miyeon offers an answer to the silence.

“If I fell, I wouldn’t know where to go,” she says truthfully. Miyeon stretches a hand to the sky, and feels the pillars of moonlight against her skin. She sees Minnie, fragmented between her fingers as she stands, hovering above her.

Minnie laughs, the sound something light and sweet. She gives her a soft smile. Answers, “Me neither.”

And, again, Miyeon feels like this is who she belongs with. Just not where.

More months pass. Not much changes. In the last days of her fall, Minnie is given a mark. Heaven no longer mourns her loss.

Gold pours, flows like from her veins and paints her wings, a punishment to those who fall; like Soojin before her, like Shuhua and Soyeon and Yuqi and so many before them.

Miyeon is the last.

In heaven, there is no one left to pity her. Time stills. For however long, Miyeon doesn’t know.

When Miyeon falls at last, heaven compensates for another mistake. The universe resets once more. Like clockwork.

And when she finds Minnie, the words still stain her skin, the ink no more faded than it had been when she’d first gotten them.

“With the deepest of affection.”

Fever catches. The world resets. It ends, like clockwork, with Miyeon.