“STOP!!!” 

The sound of his body crashing down to the ground echoed so hurtfully in my ears.

“STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP!!!”

I could see blood flowing out of his body under the moonlight, and the pain that first belonged to my ears spread around everywhere, twisting my every vein.

“STOP. IT!!!”

I could hear myself panting, screaming, panting and screaming, hissing like I had lost my head. Maybe I had. Locking my fingers with my hair so tightly, tears started to flow out of eyes in disarray. Leaning against one of the pillars in the office balcony, I started coughing in the middle of my tears, trying to take a deep breath although to completely no avail.

I had just thrown Yixing to the ground.

I was losing control. It was as if time was playing with me, rewinding itself so I kept going back to the time I thought I had gone through. The hands of the clock kept coming back to 11 PM sharp. As a plus, I had banged the clock in my room to the floor, too.

But time couldn’t be playing with me. Time is irreversible. It always has been, and it always will be. So then it was either me who was losing my head, creating illusions of time in my own head, or Yixing, who kept coming back to my office, calling me “Sir”, telling me he was about to go to the photocopy room who was playing around with me.

He did that seven times.

Still in a completely messed up body and mind, I grabbed my bag and fixed my tie, wiping my tears as I stepped up to go home.

It must have gone back to eleven o’clock again, but at least Yixing was dead and there was no chance of him coming back to me telling me the same thing over and over again.

Yixing was dead.

What the heck had I just done?

What the heck did this body make me do?

I walked downstairs in weary steps, holding onto the railing like it was my last hope. Railing. If only he had held on to that... if only I had tried to make my brother hold on to that... he would still be alive.

But he was not, just like Yixing now.

I tried to take deep breaths.

Inhale, exhale. Inhale.

And then I heard footsteps. It was as if the breath I took was trapped in my lungs, like a damsel with no prince to ever save her. Hearing the sound of the footsteps growing louder, I took slower steps downstairs, telling myself that the biggest fear that I was having at that time was wrong, wrong, wrong.

It was not.

“Evening, Sir, finished already?”

My brother died ten years ago.

It was a fire. The sun had just gone down when I noticed the elevators stopped working and the sound of people running echoed down the halls. The corridor I was in was a quiet one, providing me absolutely no one to ask, and when one person did pass the hall, he was too busy saving his own life that my question remained nothing but a question. Sparks of fire burst out from the elevators, and then my knees trembled when I realized what was happening.

“Luhan!!”

I zoomed up the stairs in rattling steps, going to the opposite direction of where everyone was going to. A big man came in front of me, dashing down the stairs so aggressively that his body hit me and threw me back a few steps. I held the railing tightly, struggling to break through the group of people who didn’t seem to have an end. I tightened my grip and felt like my whole life lied upon this grip. If I fell down again, there would be a huge possibility that I wouldn’t like the way I would die.

“Luhan you hear me?!?!”

 He was at the other end of the building, three storeys above. I just knew at that very moment that I needed to find him; that at such situation he just wouldn’t make it alone. Smoke started to conquer the air and the sound of sirens flooded the halls, drowning the shrieking voice of the people who were trying to get out of the building as quickly as possible.

And then another body hit me.

It was a mixture of shock and staccato—I could feel electricity rushing down my veins the moment my body was pushed down, and my hand, which was still gripping the railing, felt fractured; hackled; as if it was violently unattached from my arm, and before I could scream the hell out of pain, the body that hit me tackled me down the stairs.

“I heard you!”

The body belonged to Luhan.

The stream of crowd ended, and I was thankful I wasn’t left dead, trampled. Luhan had his body on top of mine and stood up right away, immediately collapsing to the stairs. I coughed and lifted my body up, quickly grabbing the railing before I collapse too.

“Kris, you need to get out of here.”

“What?! We need to get out of h—”

“—I can’t,” he got up, coughing as he reached for the railing. “There’s a man up there trapped in the room next to where I was in. I need to go get an axe upstairs to break the lock. If you go down two levels and head north there’ll—”

“—Luhan you know your asthma will kill you in no time.”

“Head north and there’ll be a red door, just open it and go downstairs. Find everyone that you can help and bring them downstairs as well. I will be—”

“—no you won’t! Stop telling me what to do and d—”

“—Kris that man is dying!!”

Luhan had both of his hands on my shoulders, shaking them a little, pushing me down the stairs. I was about to ward them off when he caught my eyes, telling me to go. Go. Go, they said. I shook my head a few times but he responded it with nods.

 “I’ll come down.” He sent a soft gaze to my eyes. “I’ll come down and get out. I’ll make it—I’ll survive. And you gotta believe in me. There is a soul up there that is worth the efforts, and please, believe me, I will make it.”

Feeling my throat full of smoke, I coughed and stepped backwards, and as I did so, he smiled and headed back upstairs, vanishing as the smoke got denser. I rushed down two levels, just like he told me to, and headed north to a red door, turning the doorknob and trudged downstairs. I reached the bottom floor and collapsed to the ground right after flinging the door open. Some people reached for me and put a mask around my face, and then I sensed fresh air. I was safe. They put me on a stretcher and then I saw it all—the flame barking to the sky, the ruins, the smoke... and before everything went black, I waited for one more single second for him to get out. To make it. To survive. 

He never did.

I ran away from the figure talking to me in a drenched body.

Zooming back to the balcony, I fell twice on my knees, dragging my body up like a mad dog. Streams of cold sweats flowed down my forehead.

“Sir, is anything wrong?”

I reached the balcony where I had committed an act of murder, or an act of self-defence, as how I would prefer to put it, and looked down. The pizza I had for dinner felt to have gone back up to my throat, demanding to go out as I found out that Yixing’s body was no longer down there on the ground. I panted real hard, even harder than when I had just pushed him down, and just as I turned my body around, Yixing appeared right in front of me.

“Is there anything I can help w—”

“Get out of my face!!”

I pulled back, pinning half of my body against the balcony railing. I could see that he was taken aback although not as much as I was. Silence was brought up, adorned with bits of hissing and panting, with coughs in between, coming out of my mouth. I gripped the railing tight, pushing myself even more backwards to stay as far away from him.

He stepped forwards. “Maybe I should get you to the hos—”

“—I SAID GET OUT!!”

I grabbed my bag which was lying on the ground, flinging my body towards him as I lifted my bag up high, aiming at his head. The seconds that passed felt to go by a lot slower afterwards, making me notice every single action made. I captured exactly how he lifted his arms up, making a cross over his head as though to protect himself from this monster that had taken over my consciousness. I wish there was a second spared for me to pull back, but my hands didn’t stop. I started screaming something I couldn’t make out and so did Yixing, and as the seconds grew slower and slower, I hoped for the time to stop, to discontinue ticking, to rest because I knew how much I would regret this.

The sounds became inaudible and all moves turned stagnant.

I let go of the bag, but the air didn’t. The bag stayed up there, floating as if gravity had never mattered.

No, it didn’t float. It just stayed. As if the air was as solid as rock.

And as I watched Yixing not moving a millimetre, I stepped back and realized that my wish had just been granted.

Time had just been stopped.

...but I hadn’t.

Footsteps were heard from my left side. I turned my head to the side, and as a shadow began to cast over me, a figure just a few centimetres shorter than me appeared, startling me with its unfamiliarity.

“So we finally meet,” the figure happened to be a boy just a few years below my age, and he sighed.

“Who are you?” I moved one step backwards. “W-what do you want?!”

His facial expression was as unfathomable as everything that was happening at the moment. “I’m Tao,” he said, “and I need you to help me.”