{MessageFromTheAuthor}

Hey guys! I know I have other fics going on, but I couldn't get this out of my head. I'd actually written a couple chapters for this story already lmao.

Poster made by me

Luhan's wing: [Link]

{CHARACTERS}

[Prologue]

Drowning.

That’s what Luhan felt when he met his eyes. Warm brown irises that wrapped him in a protective embrace, smothering him. Can someone drown you in love? To hold you in such a way you feel like the most important person in the world? To make you sit in a throne and be showered in affection? He molded Luhan into dependent person, promising him that he’d always be there as a pillar of support. Luhan wasn’t the kind of person who would put all their trusts in one person, but the man promised him love and support. A kind of attention that Luhan craved, and that’s exactly he promised.

Liar.

Luhan feels his hand extend forward and wrap around the soft appendage of the teddy bear on the other end of the bed. Its fur is soft, cold and malleable under the pads of his fingertips. He squeezes tightly, too tightly and the veins beneath his ghoulish skin become prominent, climbing up from the back of his hand and wrapping around his knuckles like veins ascending up a tree. He watches as his hand loses feeling and before long, it feels like he’s limbless from wrist down but it doesn’t bother him because his dreary life needed something to make it more colorful, even if it’s the white of his skin and the purple of his veins or the stony grey feeling of loss.

Luhan remembers when his life used to be so colorful. His clothes were colorful too. He remembers yellows and reds and greens and oranges mix and matched on his shirts and pants. He even dyed his hair a bright blonde. When was that? He can’t even recall anymore. Grey, black, and white were his primary colors, matching his dull lifestyle and blank mind.

Shifting his body to the left, he parts away the blinds to see rain splashing onto the cold concrete of the sidewalk. He wraps his hands around the metallic bars that guard the breakable glass. No one would be outside, but as he watches he sees black dots run through the street. A red car runs by and splashes dirtied water right onto his flowerbed. He makes an effort to alert his brain to become annoyed, but it exhausts him and any feeling dies right then.

 A nonplussed tune rings through his head, full of distorted sounds and random intervals of instruments that don’t make sense, but they blend into the mix and matched jingles and somehow it sounds peaceful. It’s as if someone let a child play in a high school music room, hitting random instruments with small fists and ripping out cords to the string instruments. The steady beat of the African drums are easily identifiable even through the mess of noise.  Suddenly, a haunting voice cuts through the jumbled assortment of noises and hits his core. It’s not beautiful, nor is it practiced or clean. It’s smooth and runs like a river through a jagged canal. The voice shakes to keep from dying out into the background.

Luhan arches his back from the bed with a silent groan, lifting the sheets that cover his bare legs and pushing them to the side. It’s unexpectedly hot, even in the dead of winter when ice grips the window in blue frost. He breaks into cold sweat; the two conflicting feelings in the air making his body ache once more in painful twinges.

A pounding behind his eyelids make him wince, and bright fireworks flash in his brain. To him, I feels like someone was trying to insert lit firecrackers into his head, forcefully squeezing them between the cracks of his skull. After he opens his eyes he’s momentarily blind. Though his eyes are wide open he swings his head around wildly, arms flailing for something to cling in balance. It’s the same you get when you drop downward on a rollercoaster, the feeling of your stomach moving up into your throat.

When the sound of bone crashing against hardwood floor erupts, Luhan knows he’s fallen off the bed. Settled on the floor, he waits for his brain to pick up the pain but after a minute Luhan realizes he can’t. His senses are blind. everything smells like nothing; his nose is clogged. The deafening roar of emptiness overrides his eardrums and they feel like they’re about to burst. He forgot, could he even see? Did he imagine everything? Is this what hurt felt like? He doesn’t hurt; but this feeling, what was it?

He sits up, though he doesn’t know if he has as he can’t feel the floor beneath him. He moves his head left, knowing in his mind that was where his floor length mirror was. He saw nothing, but what was he expecting? Nothing was left even if he could see. Maybe a lifeless shell of what he used to be, something that used to be of greater dignity and strength but now it’s all washed away into a puppet pulled with cotton string. If you pull too hard, he snaps and the jumbled mess of his body lands on the floor, right in the middle of the spotlight. The crowd will grow silent and their eyes will judge, just like they did last time.

“Oh jeez, Luhan, are you ok?”

Luhan lays still as he’s lifted up by his underarms, pliant to the newcomer’s actions. The stranger hauls him up on the bed, propping him up on nearby pillows to keep him from falling over. Like the pathetic teddy bear now resting on the floor, forgotten. Nothing but a puppet. To Luhan, everything is nothing, and he feels weightless because he can’t feel gravity’s hold on him. He slips through its fingers and laughs in his face (silently though because he can’t talk).

“What am I going to do with you…can’t hear, can’t see, can’t taste, can’t feel…you might as well be dead. Damn, what would he do…”

An alarm goes through Luhan’s head with bright flashes of white. His brains claws at his skull, writhing in pain because of the mere mention. That person, he knows it. It’s so familiar that it hurts when he can’t make the connections to who he is it actually makes him angry. He hears laughter, but he can’t hear anything else. It’s taunting, cold and Luhan sees red in the pitch black abyss of his vision. Everything is burning; his body feels like someone just dumped a whole gallon of molten lava onto his stomach. Fire is erupting from the inside of his body; his blood is boiling from his veins. The pain—Luhan feels it. He can’t feel anything else but the smoldering pain spreading all over his body like a freak wildfire. It’s so unique, how the pain increases and falters, nearly extinguishing itself before striking up again harshly. Almost like a heartbeat. There it is again, the beat of pain. He can’t do anything; he can’t even feel his hands. The pain increases, feeling as if someone had run him over a thousand times with a freight train.

His fingers crook and his legs stiffen dangerously before they lash out; bare skin meeting air. A pathetic whimper passes his cold lips. His eye are clouded over, a sign that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Luhan? Luhan—stay with me. , get the buckles!”

The stranger panics, hands coming down to clap on Luhan’s frail wrists but even in his weak state he puts up a fight. He doesn’t know if he’s winning or if he even is moving but he fights with all his strength.

Another man comes tumbling in clumsily with brown belts, silver buckles shining in the pale glow of the room. Quickly, the both of them tether Luhan to the bed. The man who’d just come in, brown haired with a gentle face, brings to the tip through the buckle and tightens it to the last hole and pulls it snuggly through the hoop. Luhan convulses, shoulders shaking.

Suddenly, something behind them drops. Frightened, the brown haired man looks back to find a vase of roses spilled onto the floor, expensive imported porcelain shattered in a million pieces. Upon further inspection, each shard of glimmering glass seemed to be in a perfect circular shape. They all shook with some invisible force.

“…. , call the others before Luhan wakes up! Tell them they he’s about awaken—”

With an animalistic scream, Luhan arches his back off the bed, the blankets whipping wildly as if in a thunderstorm before they fly up into the air. The air is electrified, making the hair on the men’s arms stand on end. It’s as if the air around them had intensified, being oppressed by something powerful and so demanding that it the nutrients from the mixtures of gases. A loud groan comes from beside the two men.  The one with gentle features pales, eye widening before he jumps out of the way. Immediately, the dresser flies forward. Luhan screams one last time, and it makes the whole room shake more than is already is. A soul shattering scream seeps through the fingers covering the two men’s ears, a scream that would certainly shred anyone’s vocal cords.

A sickening crunch cracks through the air.

The gentled eyed man peeks from behind the open door, half of his body pulled in the hallway.

A pool of blood trails from beneath the dresser, and the other man is nowhere in sight. Luhan snaps his head towards him, eyes wide open to reveal irises clouded like the sky during a raging typhoon. The man gasps, crawling backwards in panic. Suddenly, an unseen force holds him in place. Luhan had his arm out, hand clenched in a tight fist with fingernails digging crescent shaped indentations into his palm.

“Tell the others I’m back.”

The man nods in fear, eyes impossibly wide.

“And tell him to be ready.”

With a last sinister sneer, Luhan disappears in a cloud of smoke. Tiny grey particles float down softly onto the ruined mattress. The rest of the room isn’t any better, though the smell of iron isn’t as strong anymore. The trail of red had finally reached his toes.