Sehun jogs around the same route at the same time, a habit he has exercised for the past two years. The faster he runs, the harder the wind rakes his hair, but the humidity in the air doesn’t affect him whatsoever. In fact, he doesn’t sweat, even if he has run for a considerable length of time. He’d sweat if his body needed to be cooled. But no - his body, and his heart, were cold from the beginning.

He decides to stop by the bar to have a drink with the bar tender. The bar is nearly empty tonight, for which Sehun is glad. When he sits down, he taps the counter twice with his knuckles.

“Hello,” a stranger greets him. It isn’t the Tender. “What can I get you?”

“Where’s the Tender?” Sehun asks.

“Which one? Oh. Your friend. He’s on business.”

Managing the streets at night, Sehun supposes. How annoying. “Never mind.” Sehun leaves the counter without satisfying his craving for idle conversation. On his way out, the heavy sound of glass hitting a table causes him to turn his head. To his left, he sees the woman who had confronted him about her boyfriend. She is drinking, and she is alone.

Sehun never planned to talk to her again, but her eyes beseech him. They pull him to her table with a force urged by guilt. She looks up at him with a gaze as empty as her glass and goofily smiles.

“You’re the one … who saved me … “

Sehun didn’t save anybody.

“You know, my ex, he always drank. I wanted to try it … once.” She soothes her head with her hand. “It hurts my brain.”

A thousand insults are floating in Sehun’s mind, but the sight of her dizzy innocence locks his lips. Maybe, in her drunkenness, she’ll touch him. He’d like that. He’d like to be intoxicated by the warmth of her life.

“Where is your home?”

“Who knows?” She replies.

“Do you have an address on you?”

“Nana. My name is Nana.”

Sehun is getting a headache from this woman. Seeing that she hasn’t paid for her drink, Sehun contributes a few dollars to the cause before linking his arm through hers and pulling her to her feet.

“Where are we going?”

Sehun doesn’t care what people think about him. Because he doesn’t care, he lifts her up and into his arms. He carries her out of the bar before she burdens him with more vocal nonsense.

Sehun doesn’t believe in accommodating people. He doesn’t believe in courtesy and hospitality. A long time ago, it might have been the opposite, but now that he is a man who has the choice to become anything he wants, he has chosen to be an end.

There is never a gracious way to come to an end.

Therefore, Sehun isn’t carrying her because he likes her, although she is undeniably attractive, nor is he taking her to his apartment because she is inebriated, although that is certainly an advantage. He is taking her to a place where he knows she will be safe from predators, and because Sehun thinks he owes her a night of protection after taking away the lousy but treasured security of her ex-boyfriend.

He returns to his apartment with the woman who calls herself Nana and boards the elevator towards his penthouse. Before it carries them up, however, another man enters the elevator. He gives a judgmental but perfunctory nod to the couple before pressing the button for the twelfth floor.

“Which floor?” He asks them.

Sehun replies by brazenly staring at the abrupt guest. His hair and eyes are black as the ink of his favorite pen. He smells like smoke and coffee. And his chest does not rise with breath at all.

Sehun didn’t know that he lived with a half-breed.

As soon as the doors open, the man with the woman in his arms exits the elevator first. Himchan watches them turn left after the hallway. He didn’t know that the other penthouse was occupied. He has never seen anyone on this floor besides the women he brings to his room. Turning the opposite way, Himchan twists his key into the doorknob and ponders his neighbor’s quiet queerness.

Why does it feel like he knows him?

Sehun deposits Nana onto his couch. She has already fallen asleep, and easily folds into a fetal position to tuck her nose in between the cushions. Sehun sighs whilst he sits at the dining table and reaches for his journal. For a little while, he watches her shoulders shiver with breath and wonders what it would feel to be capable of such a mundane activity. With a hand on his heart, Sehun intently waits for the slightest pound, the most trivial of bumps, but of course, there is nothing. It is empty. His heart is empty. He is empty.

Once more, he writes.

And that the grey smoke

That went into his lungs

And out of his mouth

Was a foolish medicine

That he could not stop taking.

He wondered if he

Could ever change

Himself.

Or if he would always

Aimlessly walk

The entire crevice of his existence

Alone.

Nana wakes up with a jarring headache. With weary eyelids, she blinks once, then twice, until her vision sharpens. She is lying on a couch, she realizes, that smells like dust. By the thin light from a window, she perceives the outline of a table, the shape of a book, and the silhouette of a tall, slender man.

She withholds a gasp and sits upright. Where is she? She remembers satisfying the urge to drink the other night, but she cannot recall making any dimwitted decisions. How is it that she woke up in a dark room with a man, a scenario of which she had only heard?

Quietly, she stands and approaches the man. His face is covered by his arm, which is bent securely over an open notebook. She peers at the handwritten scrawls drawn between the black lines. It looks like poetry.

She leans closer for a clearer view. The light is so scarce that she can barely separate the words from the darkness. Nana is about to recede from the attempt when the man speaks.

“I didn’t say you could read that.”

She screams and jumps backward, slipping on her feet and toppling onto the couch. The man slams the book shut, stands, and moves toward her with a seamless, fluid stride. Unable to look at the stranger, she covers her eyes.

“Look at me.”

Nana doesn’t want to, but her hands move away from her face. Something in his voice is consoling. It promised her the truth; but she did not know if she wanted that truth.

He looks at her like she is the most beautiful woman he has ever had the privilege of being near to, yet she feels afraid because in those eyes she sees, once more, his desolate soul; and she is certain that if she looks at him any longer, she will lose every ounce of happiness she had since achieved.

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” Sehun asks. “I told you. I’m not a hero. I didn’t save you. I’m a monster.” Sehun chokes on the word. He is not used to describing himself by such a disparaging term. “You need to forget what happened, and alcohol isn’t the solution.”

“Then why do you do it?” She asks. “Why drink, if you can’t forget? Why take those pills, if it doesn’t help?” She continues, “I know, because I saw you do it when I came to talk to you that night. Are you sick?” She remembers the pain on his face after he took those pills. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Both,” Sehun grimly smiles. “Is that a problem?”

“Why?”

“Because the only way I can get better,” Sehun responds, “is to die.”

He would be twenty-seven by now.

He would be working at a company, had he continued his education and graduated with a degree.

He would have a driver’s license that showed a picture of his younger self, but instead, he looked the same.

He would have been able to call himself twenty-seven, and people would believe it, and when he had a high school reunion with his friends, they would reminisce about the past and share memories of their younger days.

But he was still young. He was still nineteen. He was still a boy who was caught between the perpendicular lines of childhood and adulthood. He was a boy with a heart and mind of a man, a boy who lived as a child for the past eight years until it dawned on him that being young forever is one of the most misunderstood goals of man.

And so, he wanted to put an end to it.

He waited for dawn to stand in the middle of the street with his arms open to the sky. The sun abused him with its heat. He could feel it seep into his pores and into his quiet heart. It choked his insides, scraped at his head, ripped his skin like paper. He screamed in pain and happiness because he was so, so glad to finally finish his course of life – and then it hit him.

Hunger.

Hunger he had not known was possible. Hunger he had never experienced. A kind of hunger that if he did not satisfy it soon, he would die.

Suddenly, he did not want to die. He wanted to be content.

He knew that he needed to stay beneath the sun. He knew that, if he was going to succeed, he needed to fail. But his instincts were stronger. He could sense every person that was watching his debacle. He could not abstain from relief any more.

And so he grabbed the man closest to him, and with tears in his eyes, he cursed him.

Himchan checks his reflection in the mirror. His skin is faultless. The shape of his cheeks, nose, lips, are inerrant. Even his eyes, which are so dark as to seem infernal, are a brilliant black. The only physical feature that he does not like is that scar.

Himchan pulls the collar from his neck to show the small blemish. With his finger, he traces the shape.

“It was an accident.”

“It was an act committed by a creature who couldn’t control himself. And you are its consequence. You’re dirty blood.”

Dirty blood.

Although no one could see it, Himchan was the most hideous man he had ever seen.