Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I once dreamt of a land called Neverland

I once dreamt of a land called Neverland

Or was it Wonderland, after all?

I shall not quarrel with its name, though

For I heard of it when I was really small

In books and poems,

And rhymes and songs,

They all seem to have taken over my soul

Forevermore shall I live in Neverland,

Forget all the troubles that I passed

For wishing upon stars

And dreaming of being rid of these scars

I once dreamt of a land called Neverland

One that I tried to reach,

When I am unable to fly

Still, if the world is made of pixie dust,

Then, who am I to comply?

Chapter Text

Time never seemed to stop ticking.

At least not when Dahn needed it the most. The test on his desk stared back at him mockingly, judging him despite not having a face to scrunch or eyes to narrow like his teachers. His eyes frantically scanned through its questions for the fifth time, as if the answers would magically manifest in his mind.

They did not.

Come on, come on... His mind conjured up whatever answer made sense, filling blank spaces with jumbles of words and numbers not even he understood the meaning of. Finally, in a moment of bliss and terror, the bell rang. The sound of papers being passed to the front filled the classroom, but Dahn’s mind was not planning on letting go. It was stubborn like that sometimes and the boy could do very little outside of listening to it. Someone nudged his shoulder from behind. “Hey.”

Only three questions left, only two, only one, only one, just this one, one more, he told himself.

Another nudge, a little harsher than the first one. “ Hey .”

Dahn hunched his back over the paper and bit down on his lip. The skin was bruised, stuck in a loop of futile healing; it had been for about a couple of years at this point. He almost did not feel any pain this time. What was it? I know this. I’ve almost got if, I--

A hand shook him. “Hey!” 

Dahn slammed his pencil onto his exam, causing the tip to break and fly across the classroom. He whipped his head to meet the eyes of a classmate. “Would you shut--?!” As the words left his mouth and he saw the girl’s blue eyes widen, Dahn forced himself to swallow whatever he had planned to say next. Guilt filled his heart and began to seep into the rest of his body, replacing the short-lived burst of emotion that had so easily overcome him. He could feel the eyes of the other students burning on his back-- he could hear every word being whispered and every thought crossing his mind. 

“Mr. Agbayani!” the teacher’s voice rang out before his brain could even articulate an apology. “You have no place raising your voice like that against a classmate or anyone in this classroom. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.” 

Mr. Williams nodded, but his face remained serious. “Apologize.”

Dahn was already a step ahead. “I’m sorry.”

“Look at someone in the face when you’re talking to them, Mr. Agbayani.”

His eyes shyly peeked at the girl's face, now an offended frown, her upper lip almost curled up in a snarl. He slowly let his gaze fall back upon the floor. “I’m sorry.” 

“Whatever,” she said with a roll of her eyes. She proceeded to snatch the test away from Dahn in a less than gentle manner, almost as if she was going to crumble and toss it in the bin instead of handing it to Mr. Williams along with the other tests she carried. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Then, just as fast as everyone’s attention had been drawn to him, everyone quickly lost interest. Students went back to packing up, leaving shortly thereafter as to not waste any second of their spring break. 

The air was once again filled with lively chatter of plans and parties, yet Dahn could not shake the feeling he was still the center of attention. The mere idea made chills go down his spine and shame tug at his gut. He threw his pens into his bag and tried to quietly go out the classroom door before being asked to stay back by Mr.Williams. 

He pursed his lips into a thin line and walked over to the teacher’s desk with short, fast steps. Being a very efficient man, Mr. Williams was already in the process of grading his students’ tests and Dahn’s was coincidentally one of the first ones he checked. He had not yet written a grade on the paper, but the prominence of Xs coupled the grave look in Mr. William’s eyes were all Dahn-- and frankly anyone-- needed to see.

“What is it?”

Mr. Williams took off his reading glasses and looked him in the eye. “Dahn, I’m worried about you.”

Dahn looked down, suddenly feeling the urge to bite down on his lip again. He knew what was coming-- he had heard it all too many times before.

“How’s everything at home?” Mr. Williams tried to find Dahn’s gaze to no avail.

“Fine.” 

Fine. Everything was just fine. It always was. Why wouldn't it be? Dahn had everything under control, as it should be. He would eat with his sister in the mornings, leave her with one of their neighbours for the rest of the day, go to school and then work until his bedtime at the ripe hour of three-- sometimes four-- in the morning. Of course, his busy schedule didn’t always leave any space for studying, but Dahn managed to somewhat make up for it by spending lunch hours in the library and reviewing his notes while he worked. 

“Just a little tired, that’s all.”

“Tired,” Mr. Williams repeated. “So, is ‘tired’ the reason behind your little outburst?”

Dahn didn’t say anything. Finally, he shook his head. “No, sir.” Agree with what he says and you get to go home. Alice must be hungry by now. Dad must be hungry.

“Have you talked about this with your father?” Such an innocent question was enough to make Dahn’s heart sink to the bottom of his stomach. He needed to get out of there quickly.

The boy bit his lip. “He…” Dahn cut himself off. “Yeah, actually. We did.”

The teacher raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he have to say, then?”

Dahn sighed, furrowing his brows. “Mr. Williams, I was actually on my way to see the guidance counselor, can we please talk about this later?”

The man said nothing, staring at Dahn with his arms crossed. Mr. Williams could be strict, but even he knew asking Dahn questions was a dead end. He shook his head and put on his reading glasses. 

“Fine. Don’t keep her waiting, Dahn.” 

There was a glint of concern in Mr. Williams’ eyes, one that Dahn always found himself subject to at specific times: Whenever he arrived late with bags under his eyes or whenever he got a test back, and especially whenever he dodged any questions regarding his father. 

It was one of the things he appreciated yet disliked about Mr. Williams.

“Thank you, sir.”

Relieved, Dahn exited the classroom and entered the stampede of students within the hallway. As expected on Friday, it was packed. The musk of the seniors fresh from PE mixed with the awful deodorant freshmen bathed themselves in, as well as a strange hint of bleach or whatever product the janitor used, filled the air. A horrible cacophony of smells, really. Thankfully, the crowd, eager to get out of the building, moved quickly. Dahn was able to reach his locker in less than a minute or two, and he would have been out the door in the same amount of time had it not been for a strong hand that latched onto his collar. 

The next thing he knew, Dahn’s ears rang as his body was slammed into the lockers. His head throbbed upon impact. 

“Hello, weirdo,” the owner of the hand said, “were you going somewhere?”

Dahn first inspected the rugged hand in front of him before slowly lifting his eyes. From the defined muscles, gorilla-like height and defined beard, it was clear the person in front of him was a senior. He wore a camo track jacket left halfway-open, revealing a NY Jets shirt underneath, with rugged jeans that looked expensive and cheap at the same time. The only things missing were the word Chad embroidered on the back of his jacket and badly tattooed on his forehead. 

A group of three others surrounded him. Dahn noted another two pairs of jeans and a flowery skirt whose owner he instantly recognized: It was the girl who had collected the tests in Mr. Williams’ class. She stood beside them, arms crossed and a frown that only deepened when she made eye contact with the boy. The other two didn’t look any different from the Rugged guy. Though he could also see them being called Hunter or Kyle as well.

“This him?” the Rugged guy asked, turning to the girl. She nodded. 

One of the other guys chuckled. “I didn’t think a gremlin could scream that loud.”

All four laughed. Dahn felt as if he was inside a movie and this was the moment he would have a confrontation with the most stereotypical bully in the school. In an ideal world, someone would step in. Stop! Leave him alone! someone would say. After that was over, that someone and him would become best friends and take on the world together for a runtime of about an hour and a half. The thought made him smirk.

The smile on Rugged guy’s face disappeared. “What are you laughing ‘bout?”

Dahn immediately looked down. Lower your head more, he reminded himself. It was always safer when he looked down.

“Look at ‘im,” his friend said, “can he even understand us? Or should we try to speak to ‘im in Chinese?”

Rugged guy’s grip on Dahn’s shirt tightened. His hand forced his chin up. “Hey.”

Dahn forced himself to articulate a response that came out flat. “What?” 

“Oh, so you do speak English,” Rugged guy said. “Heh. For a moment there I thought I would have to dumb it down for you to understand.” Again, all four laughed.

In a split second, Dahn’s mouth moved before his mind could.

“I think it’s already dumb enough for me to understand, so you don’t have to bother.”

Dahn cringed the moment those words left his mouth. Rugged guy stood there in shock for a moment, all traces of smugness wiped from his face.

“What did you say?”

Dahn refused to reply, biting his lip. He was slammed into the lockers once again. 

“I said--”

“I said I thought your English was already dumb enough for me to understand, so you didn’t have to bother. I’m sorry,” Dahn said in a flurry of words. Maybe the apology would lessen the pain of the inevitable.

It didn’t.

Rugged guy took a swing at his stomach, causing every bit of air to leave Dahn’s body. The boy felt a pain sharp as a needle pierce through the area of impact and slowly fade into a dull throb moments later. Rugged guy let go of his collar and his body crumbled onto the floor, his legs suddenly wobbly, unable to sustain him despite his low weight. Dahn tried to desperately breathe but found it nearly impossible. It was as if Rugged guy’s hands were now wrapped around his lungs and squeezed them whenever he tried. Dahn told himself this was just his body reacting to the punch. It had to be. 

He knew for a fact it would eventually pass, but primal fear wasn’t something he could easily escape through reasoning at times like these. Dahn could see Rugged guy’s shoes from the floor and hear his friends chuckle in pleasure at the sight of him on the floor, struggling to get a grip. 

“I’m sorry,” he croaked with a hoarse voice. 

“Say that to my girlfriend,” Rugged guy said. The boy tried his hardest to repeat the words, but they came out as wheezes. The girl behind Rugged guy grimaced and tugged at his sleeve as if to say Let’s go. “Ugh, forget it.”

Rugged guy shot Dahn one last condescending look as he and his group turned their backs on him. “Freak.” 

Dahn couldn’t tell how many seconds passed between having fallen to the floor and regaining his stance. His surroundings felt fuzzy and his ears were ringing. Voices passed by him, acknowledging his presence at most before moving on with their day. Apparently there were no hall monitors on duty today. By the time he managed to stand on his feet, the pain had subsided greatly, but he continued to take small breaths in fear of flares. Dahn wiped his blue shirt. He picked up his bag, which he had dropped when Rugged guy had first slammed him against the lockers, and swung it over his shoulder. As he passed by the guidance counselor’s office on his way to the exit, a heavy feeling settled on his chest. Mr. Williams and his concerned eyes came to mind.

Dahn stopped and gave the door labeled Guidance Counselor in bold letters a good look. At that moment, a woman in a simple dress came out. Her one-piece was filled with floral patterns akin to mandalas and hair was in a bun, seemingly held by her glasses in a way Dahn didn’t think it to be possible. She appeared to be around her late-thirties, with overwhelmed eyes that almost mirrored his.

The woman took one look at Dahn before addressing him.

“Can I help you with something, dear?” she asked, offering a welcoming smile.

“N-No.” Dahn cleared his throat. “I-- It’s nothing. Excuse me.”

The boy rushed away from her after doing a quick bow with his head, almost running into the crash bar doors by accident. 

You don’t have time for this.

He exited into the courtyard where groups of other students incessantly talked to each other while teachers meant to be supervising were on their phones. Nobody acknowledged Dahn leaving by himself; students often walked home by themselves, after all. He integrated a crowd of businessmen about to cross the busy streets in front of the school, almost as if he were one, too. Had it not been for his short height, he might have even looked like one as well, minus the clothes. His stomach growled and complained at the lack of food in it, prompting Dahn to pick up the pace. 

Their home was not that far away from school. It was a small apartment part of an equally small complex located at the end of one of New Yorks’ streets, literally. 

Immediately after the complex, there was a huge brick wall that stood as high as the apartments themselves, marking a dead end. In front of the apartments, a hair salon stood followed by a set of three individual houses leading to the street, all squished together like sardines. They appeared to be trying to look like San Francisco-style houses, but they ultimately fell out of place when looked at with the alleyway as a whole. Their color was off, too, being an ugly yellow, diluted pink and orange in that order. If anything, maybe it was the color that had made them impossible to sell but the lack of maintenance over the years could also be to blame. They seemed to be a forgotten project, which is why they catered mostly to teenagers and homeless schizophrenics, and why Dahn avoided going near them. 

As he entered the alleway, he passed by them as he usually did, but noticed something out of place. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that, behind the yellow house’s broken front window, a person stood. Although blurry, he could tell it was a woman or maybe just a pothead with really long hair, easily 5’7 and wearing what he thought was a tacky dress the same ugly color as the house. However, what caught his attention wasn’t her height or her choice in fashion, it was her eyes and how they seemed to be following him. He abruptly stopped, brows furrowed. 

Dahn turned around only to find no one looking at him. There was no one standing behind the broken window. The ugly yellow house was empty.

He shook his head. Must have been his imagination, he concluded. 

The hair salon’s doorbell chimed as Dahn pushed open the glass door and went inside, muttering a greeting he knew nobody but him could hear. The only woman who was cutting a customer’s hair turned to him and smiled. Her spiky hair was dyed a bright scarlet and messily pulled up into a high, practical ponytail so that nothing obstructed her face. The black tank top she wore under her apron revealed her tanned, defined muscles Dahn sometimes felt intimidated by since there was no way they had formed just from cutting hair at an obscure salon. 

“Ah, Dahn! Come in!” she said. “Sit down, punk, I’m almost done.” Dahn plopped down on one of the many styling chairs as instructed, placing his backpack on his lap.

“How was school?”

“Ok.”

“Get into any fights recently?” Dahn grimaced and she broke into a fit of laughter. Her smile dropped slightly when she saw the boy sink further into the chair’s cheap poly foam like he was trying to fuse with it. “Relax, I was just joking!” She nervously laughed.

Dahn didn’t say anything. 

“Aw, you made the kid cry!” One of the other stylists said from the other side of the salon where she stood in a circle talking with two other girls. 

“What was that?” Anita exclaimed. Her co-workers giggled and she scoffed. “You know what? I’ll uh- go get your sister, yeah. In the meantime, you want anything to drink?” 

He shook his head. “No thank you, Anita.”

“Ok. The fridge’s over there  in case you change your mind, but I only have coke.”

A couple of minutes later, Anita came down from the salon’s second floor. A small girl with short charcoal hair and slanted eyes was holding her hand. Her face lit up upon seeing Dahn.

“ Kuya! Kuya! ” She waved energetically, prompting a tired smile to form on Dahn’s lips. The girl let go of Anita and dashed towards her brother as fast as she could, throwing herself at Dahn to embrace him in a tight hug. 

“Hey, Alice.” He ruffled her hair and turned to Anita. “Thank you so much for looking after her.”

“Don’t mention it! She’s actually very calm for a kid her age, arent’cha?”

Alice gave a toothy smile, showing two of her missing front teeth. “Are we going home?”

“We are. Now, thank Anita for taking care of you.”

“Thank you very much, auntie Anita,” Alice said, which earned her an approving nod from Dahn while the woman’s eye twitched at her choice of the word “auntie”.

The boy picked up his bag and took his sister’s hand. “I’ll bring her back in by six, then.”

“Oh, about that, Dahn,” Anita said as she ran a hand through her hair. “I’m actually gonna close in a few minutes.”

“But you’ll open again by six, right?” He slightly tilted his head sideways.

She pursed her lips and hummed uncomfortably. “Yeah… No.” Anita sighed, placing her hands on her hips. “Look, it’s something urgent and I--”

He didn’t hear the rest of Anita’s explanation. Dahn’s eyes were lost as his head paced through other possible options now that Anita was no longer one. The receptionist, Mr. Bowie? No. He wasn’t exactly fond of her after his cat had met a less than desirable fate at the hands of a litter of abandoned puppies Alice had brought into their apartment. Ms. Gomez, then? She was a sweet woman in her late fifties who did like Alice. Still, that didn’t change the fact she was drunk half of the time, crying to anyone who would listen about her husband. Couldn’t he just take her to work, then? She could stay in the break room while he was at the cashier, perfectly within earshot and with no potential dangers he could think of. 

For a moment, he was almost convinced he had found an answer to his dilemma if not for remembering what had happened the first and only time he had brought Alice along on one of his shifts. He ended up having to repaint the break room’s walls just to erase the doodles Alice had made with permanent markers. Regardless, there was no erasing the damage his reputation with his manager had received.

What other options did he have, then? 

The metallic taste in his mouth snapped Dahn out of his thoughts. It made him realize that Anita had finished speaking for some time and that droplets of blood were sprouting from his lip from how hard he had been biting it. 

“Oh shi-- Lemme get some ice for that,” Anita said before rushing to the fridge and returning with ice in a plastic bag, which she offered to Dahn. He refused to take it.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m fine.”

“Dahn, your lip is bleeding --” She tried to forcefully place it on Dahn’s lip herself but he inadvertently smacked the bag out of her hands. It smashed against the ground, breaking the ice and making the other three girls turn simultaneously to see what had caused the noise. Anita’s eyes widened, holding back a gasp.

Dahn blinked a couple of times. He froze. Not again. He wiped the blood on his shirt and grasped Alice’s hand tighter. Alice’s eyes looked up to him, confused as to why he had done that. “Excuse us. Come on, Alice.”

“Thank you, auntie!” Alice waved the woman goodbye.

Anita recovered from the shock and called out for them, picking up the ice bag. “Hey, wait--!”

But they were already out the door.

“ Kuya ?” Alice asked.

“Hm? What is it?”

“Why’dja smack auntie’s hand?”

Dahn took out the key to the apartment from his pocket and opened the door. “Nothing, Alice. Just got mad.”

“Why? Did auntie make you mad?”

“It’s nothing ,” he sighed. “Don’t worry. I won’t get mad again.” They went inside, Dahn closing the door behind them,and were greeted by the usual mess that adorned the entrance hall and expanded into the rest of the apartment: A Mixture of books, papers that were either crumbled into balls or highly wrinkled, lots of cardboard boxes and plastic bags and many other items. Alice kicked off her shoes at the entrance, took off her knitted orange sweater and hastily hanged it on the peg rack to the door’s left, running off into their room on the other end of the apartment. 

“Alice! Don’t make too much noise, dad 's working.”

“Okay!” Her not-so-quiet voice rang throughout the apartment. Dahn rolled his eyes.

Dahn took the sweater from the rack and gave it a good shake to straighten it before putting it back along with his backpack. He, too, took his shoes off, neatly arranging them along with Alice’s so that they were facing the door. He gave one look at the state of the apartment and sighed. It made him feel tired just by looking at it. For now, though, he made an effort to avoid thinking about it. 

One day , he said to himself, sighing, one day I’ll clean this .

Immediately after the door to the right, there was a door Dahn approached and stood in front of, hesitating for a moment before knocking softly. “ Dad?”

Nobody answered. Dahn pursed his lips and wondered if he should knock again. 

He did. “ Dad, it’s Dahn.” Still nothing.

Dahn told himself not to think much of this. It wouldn’t be the first time his father didn’t answer the door. Clutching the hand he had used to knock into a fist, he walked away from the door and into the kitchen. 

It was, unsurprisingly, messy. 

The table was covered in takeout boxes and dirty plates Dahn was also overdue in cleaning up or throwing in the trash. Holding back a sigh, he gathered most of the takeout corpses and less than gently threw them in the trash. However, when he turned back to collect the dishes, Dahn found the space he had just cleared was now occupied by multiple animal plushies Alice had set in front of her as she sat down at the table.

“Could you please move these?” Alice pouted and held the two frog plushies in her arms tighter. “Come on, they’ll get dirty and you know they take lots of time to dry,” Dahn said. 

“…But I want my froggies to eat with me!”

Dahn’s face didn’t shift. “No toys on the table.” 

Alice’s resolve to eat in company of her plushies didn’t shift, either. There was maybe half-a-minute of silence during which she whined and furrowed her eyebrows, angrily staring at her brother with eyes that could and would be filled with tears in a moments’ notice. Had Dahn not been functioning on three hours of sleep and leftover the pizza he had had for breakfast, Alice wouldn’t have had it her way. 

Dahn gave a sigh of defeat. “… Ok, fine. But they’ll have to sit on another chair.” 

Alice’s face illuminated and, as she excitedly arranged her toys around the table while whispering reminders to “behave themselves”, Dahn was finally able to finish clearing the table. The dishes went to the sink to become part of the excessively high mountain of plates and bowls half-covered in days’ old water mixed with food remains. Alice giggled when she saw Dahn struggle to keep the dishes from falling over. He stood motionless in front of the sink for a couple of seconds just to make sure the dirty-dish harmony remained before walking to the fridge. His eyes lingered on the stack for a couple of seconds more, though, making Dahn look like an owl carefully examining its prey.

Alice pointed at the dishes. “It 'sa tower!” she exclaimed excitedly. Dahn hummed in agreement while looking into the fridge. He clicked his tongue at the sad interior of the fridge illuminated by an equally sad lightbulb that flickered. Guess instant noodles will have to do…

“ Kuya! The tower!”

Dahn poked his head out and dropped the cup of noodles he was holding at the sight of the pile of dishes in the process of crumbling down. He immediately threw his body towards them, bracing for impact, but was a second too late. One, two, three, four plates smashed against the ground and broke into thousands of pieces. The sharp sound made him grimace and clench his teeth. He opened his eyes to see the damage. White pieces and water were all over the kitchen floor as far as he could see. His attention turned towards his father’s room. The door was open and, standing in front of it, was Dahn’s father. 

He was not much taller than Dahn, maybe only five or so centimeters, but he was remarkably thinner, and his eyebags far outdid his son’s in all aspects. Still, they both shared the same hue of tanned skin coupled with a terrible posture and nearly coal-black eyes that didn’t know sleep. He wore a simple white T-shirt that was tainted by multicolor blotches and had small holes here and there. His hair was starting to grey around the edges, messy and unkempt, a pair of glasses resting on top of it instead of on the bridge of his nose. 

There was an altered look in his eyes as he scanned the room, like his dearest possession had been stolen and he was looking for the culprit. 

“Dad,” Dahn said. “ I dropped something, it’s nothing. Please go back to sleep.”

His eyes drifted to the plate pieces in front of him. He said nothing.

“ I’ll clean this up, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

After a long period of silence, the man nodded and went back inside his room, shutting the door behind him. It felt like time stopped for a moment. Alice jumped out of the chair she was sitting in and rushed to Dahn.

“Alice! Wait until I pick the glass up, you could cut yourself--”

His sister hugged him, her hands tightly clenching onto his shirt. She buried her face into Dahn’s leg. “Hey, what’s wrong?” She said something but her words were muffled by the cloth. “Alice, I can’t hear you.”

“That man’s scary…” 

“What?” Man? “You mean dad?”

She shyly nodded.

Dahn furrowed his brows and crouched down to be at the same height as her, clasping her hands together in his. “Now, why would you say that?” The little girl refused to answer, her hands tightly gripping her overalls. Dahn sighed. “You can tell me what’s wrong, ok? I won’t get mad.” He slightly tilted his head sideways. Alice didn’t answer but instead opened her arms as if asking for a hug, her eyes still on the floor. Dahn understood and picked her up with a huff. Carrying Alice wasn’t as easy of a task anymore, but that didn’t mean she would stop asking her brother to do it anyway anytime soon. 

Looking for a place to sit, Dahn decided on the living room’s embroidered sofa. The ‘living room’ was, more than anything, just the area between their father’s room and theirs, where an old sofa was placed against the wall facing the kitchen, a carpet and a small coffee table in front of it. It was the second largest area of the apartment after the kitchen. 

With slight efforts, he walked around the visible pieces of broken plates on the floor and let his body plop down on the sofa, the springs inside it complaining in response. 

He gave Alice time to let go of him and sit properly, but even when they both looked ready to talk, neither of them said anything. The little girl had brought one of her plushies with her, a Raggedy Ann doll which Dahn had gifted her some weeks ago for her birthday. Despite being relatively ‘new’, he had already sewed her left arm back on more than three times already, and the vivid blue of her dress and red of her hair had started to fade some time ago due to the constant trips to the washing machine. It truly was Alice’s favorite toy. 

 “So,” Dahn began, “are you going to tell me why you’re scared of dad?”

She squeezed her doll and leaned back further into the crevice between the sofa’s armrest and cushions. “ Panchee …”

“Hm? What?”

“That man’s a panchee ,” Alice repeated, face buried in her doll’s hair.

His brows knit together, completely lost as to what Alice meant by a “ panchee ”, let alone know what a panchee actually was. “So… dad’s a… panchee ?”

His sister nodded.

“…What makes you say that?”

After a few seconds of silence, Alice said: “When it’s night and I’m sleeping, I sometimes hear panchee crying, just like in the story kuya told me.”

If Dahn was confused before, now he was profusely curious to know what Alice was talking about.

“What story?”

“The one about the soldiers fighting! And they were gonna go fight the bad guys, but—but a panchee started crying and then they knew the bad guys had set a trap! So, they won in the end and saved everyone.” Alice leaned forward, making various motions with her arms to emphasize the important parts of the story, all the while keeping her doll close to her. Then, she sank back to her position against the armrest, a worried look taking over her. “I don’t like the panchee that lives in the kitchen.”

As Alice spoke, everything started to make sense.

She didn’t mean panchee, Alice was trying to say Banshee, the spirit whose wails signaled death.

“And one night, I went to the toilet alone because kuya wouldn’t wake up, and I saw a panchee in the kitchen crying. It was just like in the story!” Alice continued, “And she turned around and her eyes were red— and she had big fangs like this!” She made an exaggerated measure of the supposed Banshee’s fans over her head, stretching her arms sideways. “And she even had the white dress and everything! But her hair wasn’t long and flowy…”

At the mention of the dress, Dahn's stomach plummeted down like a roller coaster at an amusement park. His breath caught in his throat. Mom’s dress.

God no. God no. 

She hadn’t seen a Banshee. It had been their father crying, grasping their mother’s dress. 

Dahn would be lying if he were to say he hadn’t heard it before, too. His father’s crying was a lot of things: Heartbreaking, pitiful, contagious, scary to hear… Subtle was not one of them. 

There wasn’t any warning, just the sound of a door creaking open followed by stumbling footsteps. One second, the apartment was quiet. The next, it wasn’t. 

However, no matter how heavy his heart felt or how tight the knot in his throat squeezed, Dahn never dared to peek into the kitchen. He knew the sight of his father hunched over the table, tears running down his cheeks, would be too much for him to handle— and now that Alice had mentioned the white dress, Dahn could already feel the tears tugging at his eyes. 

For a faint moment, he was back at the hospital, several years younger and peeking through a white door into a small room filled with doctors dressed in blue and mint green clothes. They ran around a bed with a woman on it, looking exhausted and relieved at the same time. A baby cried in one of the doctor’s arms and machines gave unnervingly fast beeps as his father kneeled beside a hospital bed. He was muttering something in Tagalog, tightly gripping onto his mother’s hand.

It fell limp moments after. 

The painful memory of the sobbing and screams that filled the room snapped him back to reality, and he realized he had been silent for some time from the way Alice was looking at him. Another minute passed of her staring blankly at her brother until she offered him her Raggedy Ann doll. 

“When I hear the panchee , I hug Ann and then I feel not so scared anymore. I can share ‘er with kuya if kuya’s scared, too.”

Dahn looked at the doll and then at Alice, who gave a smile and pushed the doll closer to him. He took the doll’s arm and placed it over his stomach, giving it a light squeeze. The fabric was warm.

Huh. It did feel kind of nice. 

“See? It’s working already!” Alice said at the faint notion of Dahn’s expression softening.

He smiled. “Yeah. Thanks.” 

“But Ann always sleeps with me, so give ‘er back later, ok?” 

“I will, don’t worry.”

Alice gave a firm nod, satisfied with their agreement. Dahn stood up after handing the doll back to its owner.

“You hungry?”

“Yep!”

“Ok, help me set up the table while I pick up the glass. There are still some clean plates, I think…”

Chapter Text

Dahn washed the dishes in complete silence. Thanks to the excessive rinsing the dishes had been subject to, he didn't need to use much water to get stains and leftovers to come off, so the process had been going quite smoothly. Once the dish rack was completely full, he decided to leave it there for now and work on some homework while everything dried. He had barely managed to sit down at the kitchen table and open his chemistry textbook when his phone started going off in his pocket. It played an electric chime whose melody glitched every few notes, and one only needed to take a look at the phone itself to understand why. The screen was scratched and dirty, a single diagonal crack going perfectly from edge to edge. Its once neat silver paint job had mostly chipped away, revealing a dull grey underneath that gave it an overall tattered appearance. However, since it was an old model— one of the early Blackberries—, there was little to nothing Dahn could do to fix it. 

Having survived being dropped in the toilet and floor alike as well as the natural test of time, sounding like a dial-up modem from the 80s and having a cracked screen wasn’t that bad.

A call was coming in, but Dahn didn’t recognize the caller ID. Against his better judgement, he answered.

“Hello?”

From the thick bass and bad techno music in the background blasting through the phone’s speakers, Dahn immediately knew this was no call center trying to sell him something he didn’t need. 

“Hello?” he repeated a little louder.

“ Hello?” A voice muffled by the noise spoke.

“Yes, hello .”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes. Who is this?” Not even a minute had passed, and he was already getting annoyed.

“ My guy! Hey, it’s Tyler from work.” Dahn silently groaned at the name, alarms going off in his head. Nobody from work ever talked to him just because — let alone call him.

“… Why are you calling? And how did you get my number?” 

A nervous chuckle. “ Uh— Janet gave it to me. Listen, I don’t have much time, but I wanted to ask you something super important.”

He sighed. “What do you want?”

“Could you do me a solid and cover me at work today?”

Dahn wasn’t even surprised. 

“No,” he said without hesitation. There was no trace of empathy in his voice and he was perfectly aware of it. He had covered for him far too many times at this point and he wasn’t going to do it again if it wasn’t for a good reason, which it clearly was not .

“Aw, c’mon! Please? Dan?” Tyler complained.

If you really wanted to convince me, then you’d at least bother to get my name right, he thought. In reality, him getting his name wrong didn’t really bother Dahn, but it struck him as one detail he would get right if he was trying to get someone else to do his job. “No.”

“Dude, please it’s something important.” Tyler seemed to be even lazier at lying. Did he seriously think Dahn couldn’t hear the music from the receiving end? 

His brows knit together tighter, and he elevated his tone. “No, I’m already busy. Ask someone else.”

He heard Tyler grimace from the other end. “See, I kinda, uh… Already told the manager I wasn’t going to be able to work today and that you’d cover for me?”

His forehead furrowed, attention suddenly spiking. “What?” 

“Yeah... You're kinda supposed to be there in an hour when George's done with his shift, so…”

Dahn struggled to find the correct words to voice the thoughts and anger racing through his head. “That doesn’t make any sense! What do you mean you ‘already told her’?!”

There was a light laugh. “ Look, it ain’t that much anyway. It’s just ringing people up and organizing stuff—”

“—Yes, I know what your job is because you never bother to do it right!” 

“Perfect, then! I’ll see you on Monday ‘cause I’m also gonna be busy tomorrow.”

“Wait, I’m not—!”

“Bye!”

The call ended and Dahn was left glaring at his phone with built-up anger he didn’t get the chance to voice. Instead of throwing the phone across the room like a part of him screamed to, he slammed with his fist on the kitchen table, letting out an irritated groan. Stupid, stupid, stupid—!

He bit down on his lip only to remember how sensitive it still was from before. By sheer luck his lip didn’t start bleeding again. Anger stirred within him, bubbling in his gut. He turned to look in all directions for something to tightly grasp or maybe something to punch (although he didn’t want to admit it). Had it not been for Alice, he would have recited every curse word known to men in both English and Tagalog right then and there. Who did Tyler think he was? Just because the manager was his aunt didn’t mean he was excerpt from the rules. Yet, somehow, he was, anyway.

He fell back on his chair, forcing himself to swallow down his frustrations. A hand came up to run through his hair and stopped midway, painfully grabbin a fistful of it. Dahn stayed that way despite the stinging in his scalp and the feeling of his teeth clamming down on the inside of his cheeks, furiously breathing through his nose while staring at his chemistry book.

As time went by, his racing heart slowly started to calm down and the glare in his eyes softened, at which point he noticed how hard he had been frowning for the last minute or so, coupled with the faintest taste of copper coming from his right cheek. Frustration still hadn’t left him, it was just… less frustrating. The fist on his hair slowly came undone, releasing a mix of relief and after-pain Dahn forced himself to endure, too. He looked at his hand, a troubled look in his eyes, clenching it back into a fist until it trembled. It was fascinating to Dahn how the urge to punch something other than the table— like Tyler— had initially been so alluring, but now the mere thought of it made him feel estranged with himself.

Whatever, he paid it no mind. 

This happened all the time.

Dahn took a deep breath, then two, and finally three, exhaling just as profoundly each time.

He closed his textbook and stuffed it back into his backpack along with other books he promised himself he would review later. The time on his phone read 4:03 ; time for Tyler’s shift to start. He sighed. At least running to work would mean he would get some exercise done. However, when he went to retrieve his uniform from his closet, a pressing matter he had forgotten about was brought forth: Alice. 

She sat on her bed and silently played with her plushies as she had always asked her to, unaware of the many thoughts starting to cloud her brother’s mind. Dahn quickly dashed to the kitchen and peered out the small window above the sink at Anita’s hair salon. He clicked his tongue when he vaguely made out the word “ CLOSED” on the sign hanging from the front glass door. Alice was five — he couldn’t possibly leave her home alone and he certainly wasn’t going to take her to work.

All out of options and having wasted a couple of minutes pondering on what to do, Dahn told Alice to choose two plushies and whatever book she liked and put them inside of her backpack. 

“Why?”

“Because I have to go to work,” Dahn said, changing into his “uniform” which was just a red and white polo shirt with the store’s name embroidered on the chest’s left side pocket. He quickly ran his fingers through his hair, trying to make it look presentable and moved his bangs out of the way. 

“Are we going to auntie’s?”

“No.” Alice’s face dropped a little. “I’m sorry, ok? If it were up to me, I would have taken you to auntie’s, too, but she’s busy.”

“And what did auntie have to do?”

Dahn huffed. “She uh— she had personal things to do.”

Alice slightly tilted her head sideways. “What things? Can’t I do them with her?”

“Look, Alice, just grab your things. Please?” He kindly placed a hand on Alice’s shoulder and offered a gentle smile.

His sister looked down and nodded. “Yes, kuya .”

Dahn grabbed his jacket while Alice stuffed a whale plushie, her doll and a thick fairy tales book into a pink backpack way too small to carry them all. He didn’t say anything about this and let her take whatever she wanted to make up for not taking her to Anita’s. Once ready, Alice went to the entrance to wait for Dahn, sitting and leaning against the door. On his way out, Dahn stopped before his father’s door and contemplated it. One of his hands made its way to the doorknob, his eyes never tearing away from the wood.

The door creaked open, revealing a somehow even messier interior compared to the rest of the apartment. If he were to step inside, which Dahn rarely did, it would be practically impossible to move and not accidentally step on something. There were books and crumbled pieces of paper with blotches of color everywhere, on the floor, on the unmade bed in the corner and mainly on the desk beside it. It was filled with jars containing old, wooden paint brushes, pencil, or a combination of both. Dangerously close to the edge was a bowl of mud-colored water with an old cloth cut out of a shirt underneath it, permanently stained with watercolor paint of all of the colors of the rainbow. Most of the desk was taken up by large scrolls of paper that, despite the dimly lit room and close curtains, Dahn could see had sketches depicting animals dancing and singing with each other in a forest. His father sat on a stool hunched over them, wrinkling the paper. 

The warrior rested.

Dahn carefully approached the figure and confirmed he was, indeed, soundly asleep. Although he felt the need to wake his father to move him to his bed, he refrained from doing so and placed a blanket over his shoulders. Looking at the wall, he admired the dozens of drawings displayed on it. Each one was unique and belonged to a different story, with carefully drawn lines that established the foundation of a scene brought to life by the most beautiful colors the boy had ever seen. They filled his heart with Hope. He couldn’t wait to see with his own eyes the palace of worlds his father was building.

” Good work, Dad,” he whispered.

Like a cat, he stealthily made his way back out and closed the door behind him. He nodded at Alice asking if she was ready. She nodded back, standing up, grasping the straps of her backpack.

After they were out of the apartment and making their way to the stairs to the first floor, Alice grabbed onto her brother’s hand although she knew she would have to let go soon.

“Absolutely not.”

“ Please , I only need you to look after her for a couple of hours,” Dahn pleaded.

Mr. Bowie, the receptionist, sat behind the counter, his cat sitting on his lap while the man caringly stroked its head. It looked as bored and uninterested as always, just like its owner.

“She won’t bother you at all. Right, Alice?”

His sister stood on her tiptoes, barely able to peer over the counter, and nodded enthusiastically.

“I’m very sorry for last time, Mr. Cat,” she told the animal, which hissed in response as though it remembered Alice. But, then again, cats sometimes just seemed to hate everyone— including their owners. 

“I can pay you if that makes it any better.” Dahn reached into his backpack and pulled out his wallet. It wasn’t much, but he figured it might be just enough to get Mr. Bowie to budge.

The man, however, only leaned back on the swivel chair and said nothing. 

“Is fifteen dollars enough?”

Silence.

Dahn pursed his lips and pulled out two more bills. “Seventeen?”

Mr. Bowie looked away and started to type something into the computer on the counter.

“Twenty and I’ll look after Willow whenever you want for a month.”

This made Mr. Bowie’s eyes dart back up at him. “You think I would ever let you near my darling?” He scoffed. “I doubt experience in raising gremlins like her could translate to caring for Willow.” Dahn refrained from commenting on that, instead pulling Alice closer to him, away from the counter. “Though, I must say, I admire your dedication.”

The cat jumped off the man’s lap in advance, sensing its owner about to stand, and gave one last hiss at the teen and his sister before walking off. Dahn straightened his back a little, not letting the eye contact between them break.

“Very well, then,” Mr. Bowie said, “I’ll let her stay here, as long as she is quiet and behaved.” He eyed Alice; eyes squinted with a glare. 

Dahn let out a relieved sigh. “Thank you so much.” He threw in a smile as well for good measure even if he knew it wouldn’t be returned.

“But make it twenty-five,” he added. “Cat food has been a little pricey lately.” At this, Mr. Bowie smirked, seeing Dahn’s smile falter a little. 

“… Sure…” He painfully took out five more dollars and handed them to the receptionist with both hands. When he took them, Dahn turned to his sister and kneeled to her height, placing both of his hands firmly on her shoulders.

“You behave, ok?”

“Mhm! I will.”

“If anything happens, Mr. Bowie has a phone. You can ask to use it and call me, alright?”

“Yep, I know!” 

Dahn nodded, satisfied, standing back up. Looking back at the receptionist, he still wasn’t entirely sure he was the best person to leave Alice with. No, he was far from it. But right now, he was out of options and out of time. How much had it been since Tyler had called? Ten minutes? Twelve? It didn’t matter, they all meant he was late. He was already walking the wire with that job’s manager, and very dangerously so. No more mess-ups, he told himself every day on his way to work. Everyone had to make sacrifices to succeed, little sacrifices that secured there was food on the table and money in their pockets. His father did his part every day at the factory, and Dahn was determined to do his as well… Even if it meant leaving Alice with a less than qualified, salty receptionist who treated his cat better than people. 

He shook the thoughts out of his head to look forward. His shift would be over in a couple of hours, anyway. What was the worst that could happen? Dahn almost froze at the thought, a chill going down his spine. 

“Bye, kuya !” Alice said behind him, surely waving her hand at him. 

As he left the building, uneasiness had already started brewing inside Dahn, and it didn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. 

It’s ok. Everything will be fine.

Deep down, a part of Dahn screamed at him to go back and take Alice along with him. He began to run, telling himself it was just to get to the store faster. However, no matter how fast he went, the voice refused to die down. He hated how he had so little control over the regret he felt.

An hour into Tyler’s shift, Dahn couldn’t fight the urge to check on Alice any longer. He felt like he was being paranoid, which he most likely was, but he knew it would be impossible to properly concentrate unless he made sure everything was fine. There weren’t that many people in the store at the moment, so it was easy to slip away to the break room without having to worry about making customers wait. He pulled out his phone and dialed the contact ‘ Home/Reception’ . Mr. Bowie picked up fairly quickly.

“Marquis de Lafayette apartments, how may I help you?”

“Hello, Mr. Bowie? This is Dahn.”

A couple seconds of silence. “Oh, yes. You.”

Dahn nervously chuckled and lightly bowed his head as if nodding. “Yes, it’s me. I’m sorry for bothering you like this, but I was just wondering how Alice is.”

Again, silence. This time, it made his heart dip a little. Breathe, he thought. It’s only silence.

“Alice?” he finally said, “Oh right, the girl. She’s… fine.”

The pause was a definitive red flag in Dahn’s eyes, and he immediately asked to talk to his sister himself. He bit on his lip as he waited for an answer. Each second of silence felt as though increasingly heavy rocks were being placed inside his stomach.

“Hello? Mr. Bowie?” Dahn wondered if the line had accidentally died, silently praying the nerve-wrecking silences were due to his phone’s bad coverture and that he would soon hear Alice’s voice on the other end. He didn’t. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you just fine.”

“I want to speak to my sister. Please.” His voice was just thin of desperate, its tightness masked by the last bits of hope Dahn held in his heart. 

“ She’s not here.”

Dahn’s whole body tensed. He didn’t even dare to breath. His composure was as fragile as glass or a rope about to snap in two, and it seemed it would break at the tiniest thing. 

With a tense voice, he asked, “Where is she?” 

“I don’t know . She ran off somewhere.”

Dahn was at a loss for words. His mouth opened but no words came out every time he tried to speak. It was impossible to voice the hurricane of thoughts going through his mind.

“Hmm, come to think of it I haven’t seen Willow around, either. Willow, dear?” The man continued to call for the animal a couple more times, which was the final nail in the coffin of Dahn’s self-control.

“How can you care for that at times like these?! I asked you to look after her— I paid you for it!” His voice oozed of agitation mixed with animosity, every word intense and hostile as though his most precious treasure had been stolen from right under nose.

The man scoffed. “You worry too much. I didn’t see her run outside, so she is still inside the building, probably running around the hallways. And even if she did get out, I would’ve noticed and done something about it. Who do you take me for?”

“Gee, I wonder.” Dahn rolled his eyes. 

“Watch your mouth, brat.”

Had this been a different situation, Dahn would’ve apologized. But now… Now wasn’t a different situation. “Oh, shut up for a second. Just— I need you to go find my sister. Now.”

“She isn’t made of glass, you know?”

“Do it. Right. Now,” he hissed as venomous as a snake. “No, wait. You know what? Don’t do anything else. I’m going there right now.”

He didn’t even wait for a response, Dahn hanged up right there and there after the flurry of words came out almost as fast as how his heart was beating. However, when he turned around, he found his path was blocked by none other than his manager. She stood taller than him, not only because of her natural height but also because of her ridiculously high heels. His manager looked like the kind of person who would ask to return something without the receipt, and then throw a fit after Dahn politely explained that, without a receipt, there was nothing he could do about it. 

“Go where?” she asked, crossing her arms. The sound of her voice made Dahn internally cringe. “Last time I checked, your break doesn’t start until a few hours later.”

The emotion in Dahn’s face dissipated— he forced it to— and let a more ‘professional’ look take over. He mentally checked the volume of his voice; it always had to be more modulated when he talked with her. “I-I am fully aware of that, ma’am, but—”

“ Exactly . So, what are you doing here? Slacking off?”

“No, I was not.” The woman’s face didn’t shift. Dahn pursed his lips, a glint of hesitance flashing in his eyes. He took a deep breath. “I was only calling home because, you see, I left my little sister with a… caretaker…. So, I decided to check up on her.” He paused for a second. “There has been a situation, and I really have to get back home.”

Dahn wished with his whole heart every instance of extra hours, covering for Tyler, obediently keeping his head down and dealing with the worst customers in this, matter-of-factly, hell of a job, would finally pay him back in this moment of need. It was only fair, right? Surely it would—

“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you can’t.”

A look of disbelief crossed the teen’s face, his brows creasing and eyes widening. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. 

“But— It’s an emergency, I need to go back—!” Dahn said with a taut voice.

“If everybody left to tend to whatever ‘emergency’ came their way,” she said with air quotations, “then nobody would be working.”

“But I—!”

She stepped forward, her heels clicking against the floor, accentuating the height difference and looking down at him. There was no empathy to be seen in her eyes, which were enough to make Dahn stop mid-sentence. “I won’t repeat myself.” The manager’s long and slender finger poked his chest less than gently. “Now get back to work.” Having made her response very clear, she turned around to leave.

At that very moment, it was as if the act of so deliberately poking him had unclogged the pathways of emotion inside him, letting their contents run freely across his whole body. His frown deepened and his jaw tensed, all the while his short, ragged black hair seemed to bristle with anger. 

“No.”

She stopped. Her head barely turned back to fully look at him. Dahn thought he saw her snarl. “Excuse me?”

“I said I’m not going back to work. I’m going home.”

He decidedly walked past her, but just as he was opening the door, the woman’s strident voice rang again, louder this time. “And who says you’ll be allowed to come back? Hm? Listen here, kid, you step out of that door and you’re done here.”

His body froze. Dahn thought and the muscles grasping onto the metal doorknob tensed. His other hand curled up into a painfully tight fist. When he found his voice, it was quiet and resigned.

“… Who says I’d even want to come back here at all?”

In just a split second, all hell broke loose. Opening the door, Dahn fought to keep his gaze glued to the floor. His manager’s screams pierced through his ears and followed after him as he exited the break room with heavy yet quick steps and walked through the store. Again, he felt thankful there was nobody around to see him do the walk of shame while being barraged by a middle-aged woman screaming insults left and right. She kept telling him to face her like a real man and making fun of how much of a coward Dahn really was to question her only to walk out without a fight. He kept quiet through it all. 

After all, it was not his place to talk back to someone speaking the truth. 

By the time he stepped out of the shop, the familiar taste of warm copper was filling his mouth and no matter how much he sucked on the wound he had reopened, the bleeding wouldn’t stop. The people who were passing by stared, but they ultimately did nothing and were on their way after whispering something and exchanging a concerned look amongst each other. Dahn gripped the fabric of his pants tighter. He felt his cheeks grow warmer by the second, pressure accumulating around his eyes in the form of tears that were begging to be let out accompanied by the feeling of his nose becoming stuffy. 

Everything around him was clamoring up in piles of sounds, individual words and a chorus of voices he couldn’t tell were his own. Breathing suddenly became so much harder than it had been moments ago, and Dahn felt that if he looked up and let the world see his face, he would surely die— if he wasn’t already.

As it turned out, this wouldn’t be the case, since the universe still had one last rock to add to the pile of shame weighing his neck down. It came in the form of Dahn’s own backpack, which his manager was kind enough to retrieve for him and subsequently throw at him, more precisely at his back. Unable to anticipate the action, Dahn could only stumble forward when the light backpack carrying various textbooks and notebooks collided with him. His ex-manager screamed something else at him and walked back inside the store, telling off any by-standers who stared for a few seconds too long. 

He stood on the same spot, motionless, staring at the floor. Finally, it was only the sheer need to get out of the mall that prompted his muscles to move and pick up his backpack. It was bittersweetly thrown over his shoulder while Dahn sniffed, wiping the forming tears on his arm. 

“Um, excuse me? Are you alright?” a voice behind him said. Barely turning around, he saw a delicate hand— a young woman’s, surely— reach out to touch his shoulder. However, his heightened reflexes allowed Dahn to scurry away from the hand and its owner before it could even touch him. Don’t touch me. Don’t get close. Please leave me alone.

Like a scared deer, Dahn was quick to run off shortly thereafter, only catching a glimpse of the owner of the hand and voice. It was, as he expected, a young woman. With flowy long hair that was bound to reach below-waist length and an ugly colored yellow dress, she looked to be not much older than him, maybe just by a couple of years. Despite not recognizing the voice, he was sure he had seen her before somewhere, but couldn’t exactly pinpoint where. 

He wasn’t going to go back to ask, though. 

Go home, find Alice. Go home, find Alice. Go home, find Alice. He repeated the same words inside his mind like a mantra, but they didn’t help calm the jumping heart or his ragged breathing and much less stop the tears that stained his work uniform as he began running.

Dahn burst through the complex’s entrance at full force. His eyes were puffy from the crying, but his tears had been long dried by the wind. He panted, almost hyperventilating, desperately gasping for air. A few drops of sweat fell down the side of his face when he aggressively turned his head in all directions, scanning his surroundings like an owl hunting. A lone book on the floor was the first thing to catch his attention, one which, upon closer inspection, he immediately recognized as ‘The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales Collection Vol. II’ . It was left open, the pages showing a colorful rendition of a scene from Cinderella with some childish doodles along the margins. He picked it up.

“Alice?” He called for his sister at the top of his lungs and awaited a response. Instead, Mr. Bowie was the one to appear, preceded by the sound of stomping coming from the complex’s only flight of stairs. The receptionist had a half-alarmed look on his face, his brows creased, one hand clasped over his mouth and the other one on his hip. Dahn ran up to him, gripping onto the man’s shoulders, barely resisting the urge to dig his nails into them. A flurry of questions escaped his lips. “Where is she? Did you find her?”

Mr. Bowie distastefully peeled Dahn’s hands off before answering, adjusting his perfectly round, Harry Potter-like glasses. “Please don’t do that again. And no, I haven’t found her.”

Dahn’s heart jumped for possibly the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes. 

“But,” the receptionist continued, “it’s quite strange. I could’ve sworn I saw her go upstairs— I heard her. It doesn’t make sense, she should—”

The teen didn’t stick around to hear the rest of Mr. Bowie’s side of the story. He shot off and went up the stairs two steps at a time. Their apartment on the second floor was the first place he checked. It wouldn’t make sense for Alice to be there, but Dahn had given her a spare key to the apartment not too long ago, so it wasn’t far-fetched to think she could’ve gone back to retrieve more toys or books. Once he got the door to open, though, he found no trace of his sister inside. 

He dashed back out of the apartment without bothering to lock the door again and moved on to check the other floors. The invisible rope wrapped around his heart and throat continued to tighten as he neared the complex’s last floor, similar to how a boa would squeeze their prey to the death.

By the time he reached the door that led to the rooftop, muscles in his stomach and legs complained aching from all of the efforts they had been subject to by their owner. 

As he stood before it, Dahn effervescently prayed in silence for this door to be locked. A trembling hand made its way to grab the door handle, at which point he was surprised to feel the metal strangely warm. Then again, his fingers could’ve just been colder than the metal. Closing his eyes, holding back his breath, he turned it.  

“Oh, thank God ,” Dahn sighed. It was locked. His whole body was about to melt into a pile of nerves and caffeine pills. However, the ephemeral moment of pure relief came to an end fairly quickly. Alice was still nowhere to be seen. 

Pursing his lips and taking a deep breath, he returned to the reception just in time to see Mr. Bowie come out of the storage room next to the stairs. The look in Dahn’s eyes was more than enough to answer any questions Mr. Bowie would’ve asked him. 

“The brat isn’t in there, either,” Mr. Bowie said. He signaled the storage room with his eyes while crossing his arms.

Dahn ran a hand through his hair. His bangs were damp with sweat. “What do we do?! Where could she have gone?!” 

“I don’t know. Willow’s missing, too.” The man’s tone shifted into a more concerned one, a fond look in his eyes. “I haven’t seen her for a while, now.”

“Is your damn cat the only thing you care about?!” 

Mr. Bowie’s mouth gaped. “Is that damn brat the only thing you care about?!” 

Dahn hadn’t felt the urge to strangle someone that bad in days. His twitching fingers curled up into fists at his sides and his upper lip formed a deep snarl that was rendered ineffective due to his height and overall young appearance. If he had been blessed with other genes, however, things would’ve been drastically different. For now, though, he settled for swallowing his anger, biting his cheek on the inside and punching the nearest wall so hard his knuckles went white.

It hurt. Damn it, it really hurt. 

“ Hey ! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Waves of pain runned up Dahn’s arm. He gave the wall another punch, weaker than the previous one, but one that earned scolding from Mr. Bowie, nonetheless. Retrieving his hand from the wall, he saw he hadn’t done much damage to it; in fact, he hadn’t done any notable damage at all. 

The same couldn’t be said about his hand, though. The pain was starting to numb down into a tingling sensation one might feel when their arms or legs fell asleep, but he could still feel its ghost lingering around his reddened knuckles. Wet was beginning to gather at his eyes. He was going to cry again. This realization only made the frustration in him rise. A chorus of mocking voices sang in his head: ‘All your fault, all your fault, all your fault’, which he could only interpret as one thing: Failure. Nothing but a failure.

Dahn prepared to deliver another punch but was abruptly reminded of Mr. Bowie’s presence when the adult grabbed him by the wrist, stopping it mid-air. Dahn’s strength might’ve been raw from unfiltered emotion, but that didn’t change the fact he was still only seventeen and Mr. Bowie was older by the decades. He shyly looked up at the man, tensing his jaw without letting his clenched teeth show. Something in Mr. Bowie’s gaze shifted when he caught notice of the tiny beads of water threatening to escape from the wells of his eyes. It could’ve been the tiniest trace of sympathy from his cat being missing as well, or maybe just the disgust that arose from the idea of having to deal with Dahn going into a full-on breakdown. 

“Go look again,” he ordered Dahn. “I’m positive she must still be here.”

A part of Dahn didn’t see the point in doing so, but what other choice did he have? He found himself nodding absentmindedly, snatching his hand back rather harshly. 

One search across the four floors later and he was no closer to finding Alice than he had been five minutes ago. He took his time walking across the small and narrow hallways, expecting his findings to be the same and different than before, even going back to their apartment to check every nook and cranny Alice could’ve hid in without any luck. As he was making his way back downstairs, a series of noises coming from one of the apartments made him stop on his tracks. 

From behind the door, someone— no, a woman was crying, and there was the sound of thumping in the background. It was loud enough to hear all the way where Dahn stood on the staircase. Fueled by morbid curiosity, he approached the apartment and, with only one glance at the door, suddenly everything made sense.

The owner of apartment no.2 was a Dominican woman in her late forties, Mrs. Gomez, acquainted with Dahn’s family mainly because they were both immigrants who could additionally communicate in Spanish. She was a nice, calm and sweet woman the teen enjoyed engaging in small talk with, at least until she discovered her husband had been cheating on her— had been for a while after they moved next-door to them. At first, he worried for the woman and tried to keep her company in the aftermath of her marriage’s fallout, but he quickly discovered how many things could go wrong in such a short period of time. Her apartment soon reeked of cheap alcohol and bottles as well as pill bottles became a familiar sight on bureaus and tables. Not only that, Mrs. Gomez developed a tendency to overshare… various types of information Dahn had no interest in learning about during their conversation. So, nowadays, their interactions were limited to a polite greeting whenever they crossed paths when Dahn was on his way back to school, and he wished for things to stay that way. Hearing her cry from across the door, he felt a tinge of sadness in his chest but told himself it was none of his business. He spared the door one last glance before continuing on his way to the reception.

“Nothing,” he said. Mr. Bowie, leaning against the reception’s counter, sighed. At this point, Dahn was seriously starting to consider calling the police. Having searched the complex left and right, careful not to leave any stone unturned, he saw no other option left. 

“Are you calling your father?” Mr. Bowie asked upon seeing the teen take out his phone.

Dahn stopped for a moment. His father had long left for work and was most likely very busy, but… He stared down at the cellphone’s broken screen. He usually held back on bothering his father, perfectly aware of the low tolerance some jobs had for people who were caught “slacking off” but there was an exception to be made for this situation. His father would understand. 

Dahn’s palms were sweaty as he dialed the warehouse’s number. 

He had to. 

A woman picked up in a matter of seconds. “Hello! Thank you for calling the Daintree Inc. New York headquarters, how may I help you?”

“Hello, good day— I mean,” Dahn groaned, “I’m calling to talk of one of your employees, his name is Ida Agbayani, I-I’m his son.”

“…I’m sorry, I didn’t catch all of that, could you repeat it once more? Who do you want to talk to, sweetie?”

Dahn cringed at the nickname. “Ida Agbayani, he works in packaging. Please , it’s important.” 

“Yes, of course. So, Ida in packaging, right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dahn.”

The woman went quiet for what felt like hours, the only sounds he could hear being that of fast typing. He bit down on his lip as carefully as he could to prevent it from bleeding.

“Ok, I’ve got it. Give me a second, sweetie, I’ll go find him.”

Even more silence. Dahn usually liked when it was silent. Concentrating on the task at hand was way easier when it was silent than when surrounded by classmates who never shut up and listened to crappy hip-hop on their headphones just loud enough for him to hear. ‘Silence’ was his ideal working atmosphere. No distractions meant more efficiency, but sometimes the ‘silence’ proved to be a double-edged sword. ‘Silence’ also meant being alone, and Dahn didn’t necessarily like being alone as much as he liked not being bothered. 

The sound of voices coming from the other line called Dahn’s attention. It appeared the woman who had answered was talking to a man— no, from the sound of their voices they were arguing.

“Hello?”

“Um, sweetie, I can’t get your dad on the line, but I think I can leave him a message for you. Is that ok with you?”

Dahn sighed. Second best option, second best option, he told himself. “Yes. Please tell him to come home immediately. My sister is missing, and we can’t find her.”

The woman slightly gasped. “Oh, dear, that’s terrible. I’m sorry for intruding but, how old is she?”

“Please just tell him that.”

“Oh, yes, I will. I’m sorry.” A chuckle.

Dahn slightly bowed his head in gratitude. “Thank you very much.”

“I’ll tell him right now, don’t worry, sweetie. I hope you find your sister.”

“… Goodbye.”

The line clicked, and a hand made its way to Dahn’s mouth to feel the bruised skin of his lip. He’d need to go to the pharmacy later.

Chapter Text

Dahn’s head snapped upwards. He had been hearing thumping and things falling to the floor in Mrs. Gomez’s apartment upstairs for the past ten minutes or so, but the sound of glass breaking provoked a bigger reaction in him— probably because he had grown weary of such sounds ever since Alice had been born. Mr. Bowie also looked up at the same time, scrunching his eyebrows.

“She’s been going at it for some time, now…” Dahn noted as he paced across the entrance lobby. A tinge of unwanted concern seeped into his words.

“I’ve seen her worse,” Mr. Bowie said. “Usually, I hear more screaming.” That last part made Dahn cringe a little, but only on the inside.

“Shouldn’t you go check on her?”

“I should… But that doesn’t mean I want to.” The man laid back on the recliner he sat on, and that was the end of the short exchange. Surprisingly, it was Mr. Bowie who spoke up first next. “When did the officer say he was getting here?”

Dahn looked at his phone and sighed. “Five minutes ago.”

Once he had contacted— or, well, tried to contact— his father, Dahn called the police to formally report Alice as missing. Of course, he only got to do so only after being put on hold for five insufferable minutes during which Mr. Bowie had to ask him to stop tapping his foot more than once. The dispatcher, thankfully, was quick to take Dahn’s situation seriously and the report was filed in no less than a couple of minutes. He assigned two officers in the area to handle the case and, before hanging up, asked Dahn to search the apartments once more just to confirm Alice was not inside. Two more searches had gone by, but their findings remained the same: Empty halls and no response whenever Dahn called his sister’s name.

Another crash, this one louder than the first. Not even two seconds after, cries and wails broke out. Dahn imagined this was what a Banshee would sound like if they were to exist. It was unpleasant, dreadful and something frankly nobody would want to ever hear near them.

“Ah, there it is.” Mr. Bowie stood up. He walked over to his desk and retrieved a pair of earplugs from one of its small drawers, snuggling them inside his ears. He sat back down on the recliner, becoming blissfully unaware of Mrs. Gomez’s ruckus. Dahn silently wished he could do the same, but a part of him argued against it. Not only because using his hands to block out the noise would be extremely ineffective, but also because it felt plain wrong to sit there while the poor woman destroyed her apartment. Maybe it was the soft spot he had for Mrs. Gomez the one that prompted him to go upstairs and knock softly on her door, or maybe just the fact her crying made him extremely uneasy; either way, Dahn was now standing in front of the door labeled #02 , waiting for a response that never came. He tried knocking a little louder, but it seemed the knocks were drowned out by the noise coming from inside.

As he was about to knock a third time, the inside of the apartment suddenly went silent. The sudden change from pure mayhem to cancerous silence was so abrupt Dahn did not even knock— his hand stopped dead on its tracks before hitting the door. Something on his face shifted. At that moment, every alarm in his head started going off, his heart doing somersault after somersault. He reached for the doorknob without hesitation, expecting for it to be locked.

Sometimes, life proving him wrong was not that bad after all, Dahn fleetingly concluded as he pushed the door open.

He stepped into the apartment, not bothering to take his shoes off. Mrs. Gomez’s apartment, like the rest in the complex, was built the same as his and, for the most part, looked somewhat like it, as well— at least from Dahn’s memories of visiting it years ago. Looking at it now, though, Mrs. Gomez’s apartment was almost unrecognizable. An array of items—porcelain figures, picture frames, books, clothes and a lot of bottles— was dispersed along the carpeted floor, purposefully, he assumed, some of them broken. The coffee table across him was knocked over like the chairs and kitchen table past the entrance hallway, and, as he made his way inside, he saw the living room’s lace curtains had been forcefully ripped from their curtain rod. It looked as if a hurricane had passed through.

Dahn hadn’t taken more than ten steps inside when something cracked under his shoe. It was a piece of glass, no bigger than his hand. He picked it up and saw his fractured reflection for a moment before it crumbled into five smaller pieces that fell back onto the floor. As it turned out, the shard wasn’t the only one on the floor, in fact, there was a whole trail of broken glass he had somehow missed which led to the bathroom on the entrance hallway’s left. He followed it with unsure steps. The bathroom door was closed. His breath caught in his throat, a faint notion of nausea began to build up inside him. He bit his lip.

The door creaked open, slowly filling the dark inside with the warm afternoon light coming in from the curtainless window in the living room. The first thing he saw was more broken glass that only managed to instill more dread into Dahn. His hand let go of the handle, but the door continued opening on its own, having already amounted enough momentum to do so.

The sight that awaited inside unfolded before his unblinking eyes like an image loading in an old computer. With every part of it that became visible, his heart sank a little deeper into his stomach. The bathroom mirror cabinet was halfway open and broken, only big chunks remaining in place. Its insides were in disarray and some medical supplies once stored in it were now either on the floor or in the sink. In front of it all was Mrs. Gomez, slouched and wearing what Dahn assumed to be pajamas. Her long, deep brown hair was messy, frizzy and looked like it hadn’t been washed in days. As the door opened, Mrs. Gomez had turned around and God, she really looked awful: Faint remains of mascara ran down her cheekbones along with dried tears and worry wrinkles were all over her face and forehead, giving her a miserable appearance Dahn couldn’t tear his gaze away from.

They stayed like that for a few seconds, staring at each other like how an owner who just walked in on their pet eating something they shouldn’t. His eyes slowly trailed down from looking directly at hers to her hands. In one of them, she held a wine bottle and, on the other, an opened pill bottle with an orange sticker. Mrs. Gomez let the latter fall from her hand, cluttering against the floor like a drop of water abruptly falling into a tranquil pond that broke the morbid trance Dahn had been pulled into.

One look at the fallen bottle confirmed Dahn’s greatest fear.

It was empty.

The series of events that transpired during the next few seconds were nothing more than a blur for him, as though he had entered a dissociative state in which he could only observe his body move from the astral plane of existence, powerless to do anything but watch. He saw Mrs. Gomez’s face contort from one of blank cluelessness into one of fear and, finally, settle into one of terror when she saw him dash towards her, all in slow motion. She tried to retreat despite already being at the back end of the bathroom and, when that failed, she attempted to run around Dahn and make a run for the door. However, her steps were clumsy and Dahn had no trouble blocking her path.

As they collided against each other, sound also appeared to have been blocked out from Dahn’s ears for some reason. No screams reached him despite it being obvious Mrs. Gomez was letting out blood curdling wails, and he failed to hear the wine bottle crash against the ground when she lost her grip on it. Even his own words sounded muffled. He could still tell he was screaming, though. The vibrations he felt in his throat were more than enough to know.

Before she could push him away, Dahn wrapped his arms tightly around her and refused to let go, hands tightly gripping onto the cloth of her pajamas and some strands of hair. She continued to struggle regardless, her nails scratching and painfully poking at various parts of his body, but he wouldn’t budge.

Please, please, please stop, Dahn thought. Please don’t die on me, I beg of you, God, please don’t let her die on me. It wasn’t his business, but it felt as though it somehow was .

Then, Mrs. Gomez stopped fighting against his grip. She stopped struggling altogether and started to melt into the embrace. Dahn wondered if he had actually said those things out loud. It seemed to take hours for her to grow completely relaxed, but she eventually got there, letting her arms go limp at her sides. All of a sudden, her legs went weak, like they had exhausted all of their energy to even manage to stand, and the frail woman slowly sank to the floor. Dahn went down with her at the same time until they were both sitting on the floor in a less than comfortable position. No matter, Dahn still wasn’t going to let go— if anything, he only hugged her with much more force, burying his head in the area between her shoulder and neck. In response, a pair of hands made their way to his back and reciprocated the hug. The first thing he heard in the last minute— or had it been more? — were gentle sobs. They quickly evolved into full-fledged crying as the adrenaline that had possessed them began to dissipate just like grey clouds after a storm, leaving nothing to be seen on the blue sky but raw, unfiltered sadness.

Dahn, however, didn’t find it in him to cry. Everything had happened so fast it hadn’t had the opportunity to process everything that was happening around him before being overwhelmed with emotion on all fronts. He could only muster enough force to gently pat the woman on the back as gently as he could, afraid the slightest change in movement would cause her to snap. If she did, Dahn wouldn’t be able to hold her back. No words were exchanged. 

Although he showed no expression on the outside, appearing to be as cool and in control of the situation as he could be, Dahn was experiencing levels of panic he couldn’t bring himself to describe, even if he wanted to. His heart was beating like a drum at such a fast tempo in his throat it made him wonder if Mrs. Gomez could feel it, and every breath he took felt as though it would be his last.

For the next few minutes— or maybe the next few seconds, Dahn couldn’t tell— they stayed there, Mrs. Gomez crying uncontrollably into him and Dahn comforting her on the floor.

They were interrupted by Mr. Bowie’s sudden appearance at the apartment’s door startled them and caused Mrs. Gomez to withdraw from the embrace, letting out shaky breaths and inaudible sobs. She nervously ran her hands across her arms, eyes flickering between Dahn and the door, looking like those of a deer in headlights.

“You, kid, the officer’s here, what are…” His voice and face fell the moment he came into view of the scene, adopting a look of disbelief and confusion. He turned to Dahn expecting answers, but the teen only looked back without saying a word, eyes wide as a plate. Mr. Bowie sighed. “Ok, what happened here,” he said in a deadpan voice, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Dahn cleared his throat. “The officer’s here?” he repeated.

“Waiting in the lobby.”

“Right. Thank you. I’ll uh—” Dahn stood up, turned to Mrs. Gomez, and stopped mid-sentence. Their eyes met once again for a couple of seconds. He hesitated for a moment before offering his hand to the woman. She took it while averting her gaze to look at the floor. Dahn handed her off to Mr. Bowie, who instantly complained about it. “Please also call for an ambulance— I’ll explain later, but we need to get her to a hospital. Now.” His voice was firm, dead serious. He gestured with his eyes at the bottle of pills behind him hoping Mr. Bowie understood what he was talking about because he sure as hell wasn’t going to spell it out for him. Thankfully, the receptionist seemed to understand. He went quiet. “Fine.” Dahn nodded. 

They were about to leave the apartment when Dahn stopped with one foot out of the entrance door. His brows knit together. He turned around and saw the inside of the apartment in the same messy state as when he had come in, nothing more, nothing less. Huh, must be my imagination. Then, he heard it again, this time more clearly. “Wait,” he said.

“What is it now?” Mr. Bowie said.

“I… I thought I heard something.”

The receptionist groaned. “You said we needed to hurry. "

“Yeah, I did, but—" Dahn cut himself off upon hearing the noise again.

There. There it is again. It was a voice, a small, tiny voice, barely audible yet somehow, still able to reach him. “It’s… a voice.”

Dahn walk-ran back into the apartment. The kitchen was empty and living, both located in the same area, were lacking in anyone that could’ve been the owner of the voice. He stood motionless in the middle of both areas for a few seconds. The voice called again. Dahn could tell he was close to it, but at the same time he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He walked into the small bedroom in the apartment’s far-right corner, which would’ve been his and Alice’s in their own apartment. He felt the wall next to the door for a switch which, upon finding, illuminated the inside of the room. Right off the bat, Dahn could tell this wasn’t being used as a bedroom but more for storage purposes, since it was filled with various items, plastic bags and boxes covered by a thin layer of dust, pilled up and labeled as ‘ Casa docs.’, ‘Decoraciones Nav.’, and other things in Spanish. What caught his attention the most was the giant wardrobe at the end of the room to his right and what jumped out of it accompanied by the sound of a bell. Its dark oak doors creaked open and, from them, a light greyish-blue cat came out. The fur on its back and tail stood up and it gave quick steps away from the closet as though it was trying to escape from something.

It was Mr. Bowie’s cat.

Willow barely stopped to spare Dahn a look, hissing instead to ask for him to move aside from the door. How— how did she get here? That cat always did as it pleased, but she couldn’t have come inside the apartment even if she wanted to unless… Unless the door had been left open.

Dahn walked towards the wardrobe, an unlikely hypothesis forming inside his mind. One of his hands grabbed into the beautifully carved handles and pulled it completely open. He was greeted by a collection of women’s coats, all hanging uniformly in line and surely covered in dust like the rest of the things in the storage room. It was only when he looked down that he noticed, in between the equally old-looking shoes arranged below the coats, a pair of small, pink tennis poking out. Dahn’s heart jumped. Using both hands, he parted the coats, making dust fly and tickle his nose.

Alice was standing behind them, clutching her Anne doll tightly against her chest.

The little girl whimpered when the coats were pulled apart and cowered. Her face looked frankly like that of a terrified child who had lost their mother at the supermarket in the sea of strangers: Eyes still fresh with tears, nose leaking and a trembling lip. Dahn instantly noticed the pair of scratches she had below her left eye and next to her mouth, each made up of three thin lines, but didn’t have it in him to get mad. Upon noticing the one standing before her was her brother, Alice’s face illuminated. Her eyes glistened with renewed tears that were soon falling onto her overalls. “ Ku…ya…” she said in a trembling voice. Dahn had felt the tears starting to build up for some time now, and Alice calling him had been what triggered a single tear to roll down his cheek.

 Not being able to hold back the tears any longer, she began to cry with all of her strength. Alice ran out of the closet with her arms open for a hug Dahn was more than ready to reciprocate.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Dahn kept repeating while rubbing gentle circles onto her back. It did little to ease Alice’s crying.

In between sobs, she tried to explain everything to her brother. He understood something about having followed Mr. Bowie’s cat into the apartment while playing, a monster coming in and hiding in the closet in fear of being eaten.

“And— and then, Mr. Cat scratched me because I was scared and he hurt Anne, t-too! And the monster was sad and screamed a lot and, and—!" Alice began crying again before she could finish the sentence, clenching tighter to Dahn’s clothes.

“Shhh… You’re fine n-now.” He hadn’t meant for his voice to break, and he hated that it did. A weak smile formed on his lips as he forced himself to swallow a thick batch of saliva. Painfully, he teared Alice away from him to scan her from head to toe. Apart from being a little dusty from being inside the wardrobe and having cat scratches on her face, Alice looked to be ok. He turned her face at different angles, gently tracing over one of the scratches, the one under her eye, with his thumb. Already, he was thinking of all of the best ways to turn that damned cat into a fur coat and use the money from selling it to pay for Alice’s schooling, but, for now, that could wait. A relieved breath escaped him, and he pulled Alice back into another hug. “I’m so, so glad you’re ok.” The relief he felt in that moment almost made him forget about the crushing guilt he had been bearing on his shoulder for the past hour.

“I’m sorry…”

“I know, I know.”

A few seconds of silence.

“Are you… mad at me?” Alice said. The question pierced through Dahn’s heart like a dagger, mercilessly.

“No, no, I’m not mad,” Dahn quickly assured her, running his hands through her hair. “I was just very scared.”

“Did you have to stop working because of me?”

Dahn’s brows creased and he pursed his lips. They pulled apart, but Dahn took and kept Alice’s hands in his. She was looking down, shame in her eyes, her mouth straight and shoulders slumped forward. It was a too familiar yet completely alien sight for him, but it let him know Alice truly felt bad. She always did remind Dahn of himself when he was her age. “Well, yeah, I did have to leave early, but—”

“—Is it my fault?”

“ Alice. ” He squeezed her sister’s hands tighter, looking for her gaze. “It’s not your fault. It never was.” ‘ It was mine; I never should’ve left you alone ,’ he didn’t say. He wiped his cheeks on his sweater’s hood.

“You know I really care about you, right? That means I’ll always be there for you no matter what. Even if I’m at work, or at school, if you need me, I’ll be there before you know it. But please, please know you’re never at fault. Never. Ok?”

Alice sniffed, wiping her nose on her arm. She didn’t say anything.

“Alice, I asked you a question.”

His sister nodded. He frowned; she didn’t look like she meant her response. Suddenly, an idea came to mind. Dahn smiled. “Remember the black cat we saw yesterday?” Alice nodded. “Well, I think it was a witch’s familiar spirit.”

The little girl’s head perked up. “A witch? Like the mean lady at the store?”

“Yeah, exactly. In fact, I think it was her familiar.” Ever since the incident with the permanent marker and Dahn’s manager, Alice had always referred to the woman as a witch and, to be fair, Dahn didn’t object to the choice of words. “I think she cast a spell to give us bad luck today and the cat came to deliver it.”

“Is that why Mr. Cat almost tore Anne’s arm off?” Alice raised her doll to show that, indeed, the seams around her arm had been stressed in a more than noticeable way. The arm was practically dangling off loose strings.

“… Maybe. For the time being, though, let’s steer clear of cats, ok?”

“Ok.”

Dahn stood up and Alice took his hand, using the other to wipe the dust off of her overalls.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, kuya .”

The two of them walked out of the room and apartment hand in hand. Neither of them looked back. When they got downstairs, Mr. Bowie and Mrs. Gomez were nowhere to be seen. Dahn wished with all his heart that the two had gotten to a hospital safely. Maybe he would start paying visits to Mrs. Gomez again once her emotional state calmed down. This would be very unlikely, though, given he now needed to look for another job first thing tomorrow. However, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Chapter Text

The climate was starting to change from summer into fall, and it was noticeable from the strong breezes of air hitting the kitchen window, making the old wood creak and the glass rattle. The sky was still fairly illuminated despite the sun having already disappeared behind the horizon, leaving the sky a gradient of blues, purples and soft yellows. Alice’s bedtime was due soon at 9:00 PM, but Dahn had decided to make an exception and let her stay up a little longer. He didn’t have any other work left to do for the day, except for homework, and so he decided to dedicate the rest of the day to spending time with Alice.

After having thoroughly apologized to the police officer, who was very understanding of Dahn, even looking relieved upon seeing Alice had been found, the pair of siblings went back to their apartment. For the next hours, they had played whatever game Alice had come up with: Playing out one of her favorite books like it was a play, organizing a tea party and solving riddles. Once she grew tired of running around the apartment, Dahn and her built a fort on the couch supported by towers of books, pillows, blankets, and whatever they came across. Inside, they devoured book after book; Dahn read her enough stories for his throat to go dry, most of which he had already read enough times to know by heart. Nevertheless, he wasn’t bothered by this at all. Alice was happy, and that was more than enough.

“’And that evening, when the children came running to the garden, they found the Giant dead under the giant tree, his body covered in white flowers…’ The end.” Dahn finished the story and turned to Alice, who had a disheartened look on her face. “Aw, what’s wrong? Was the ending too sad?”

“Mhm.” She sulked against her plushies. “The Giant was good, he didn’t have’ ta die…” Alice crossed her arms. Her brother chuckled.

“Well,” Dahn said, “sometimes people just… die.” His tone fell as the last word rolled off his tongue. He averted his gaze back to the book, the smile he had sprouted for some time now faltered. There was an illustration on the last page, showing an interpretation of the story’s Giant lying on green grass in front of a tree whose shadow blocked the sunlight from getting to him. A group of children surrounded him as white petals flew in the air from his old but massive body. His face was almost peaceful, relieved, one that showed he had achieved closure. Dahn felt a sour taste in his mouth and swallowed with trouble. “Anyway, are you ready to go to bed, now?”

“Nope! Another one!”

“Alice, at this rate we’ll run out of books to read if we haven’t already.”

“Please! Just one more!” Alice asked. She reached across her for a random book with a ruby red book cover, which he shoved into Dahn’s hands. “This one, this one!” She leaned back into the sofa’s armrest, cushioned by comfy pillows. One hand pulled a blanket over herself and the other grabbed a couple of plushies. “Ok, I’m ready.” Alice looked like a badly wrapped burrito with plushies as sprinkles on top. Dahn thought for a moment and finally laughed.

“Fine. Last one.” He examined the cover and quickly flipped the pages to tell the length of each chapter. “Ok, ‘The Black Corsair’ it is, then. But we’re not reading it all, just a little bit, got it?”

“Yup!”

Dahn opened his mouth but, before he could say anything, they heard the front door opening, followed by the jostling of keys and the sound of shoes coming off. The unsaid words caught in Dahn’s throat. Dad’s back.

Ever since he had found Alice, his father hadn’t left his mind one moment. He kept checking his phone just in case a call came in, but none ever did. He contemplated calling the warehouse again to update him on the situation, but he never actually went through with it under the guise his father was already on his way and thus wouldn’t have access to a phone. Dahn continuously told himself that, maybe he was running a little late, but he would surely come. He didn’t.

Until now, that is.

His phone read 9:46 PM when he checked it. Without taking extra hours into consideration, it was the usual hour his father got back home. Dahn scrambled out of the fort, careful not to knock over anything that might make it crumble down and came face to face with his father. He wore the warehouse’s uniform, a green and black shirt and matching track pants that looked too large for him; this was another trait Dahn had inherited entirely from him. His eyes were set on the fort, but his monotonous face didn’t let Dahn know if he looked at it with surprise or confusion. Alice’s head peered out as a snail coming out of its shell. She spared the man one look and immediately retreated into the fort, letting out a small gasp. Dahn’s father seemed unaffected by this.

“Dad,” Dahn said. “Welcome back.”

Silence.

“Um-- Oh, this? It’s nothing you should worry about, we were just playing-- I’ll clean it up before going to bed.” Dahn gave an apologetic smile.

Again, no response.

“Would you like something to eat? I can cook up something if you want to.”

“… That would be nice. Thank you,” his father said. Dahn gave a silent sigh of relief at getting an answer to that question.

“Good, that’s-uh, good. I’ll bring it over to your room in a few minutes.” He smiled. Dahn’s father nodded, pursing his lips into a straight line and, after sparing the fort one last glance, went into his room. The door was gently shut behind him. Dahn’s smile slowly died down and his usual frown took its place, chin just barely dipping to his chest. One of his hands clenched onto the fabric of his shirt.

Alice’s head poked out of the fort once more, carefully scanning the area before deciding to step outside. In her hands, she held the book with the red cover, an unsure look in her black eyes. She approached her brother and tugged his shirt. “ Kuya? Are you going to read me the book?”

Dahn ruffled her hair without turning to look at her. “Tomorrow, alright?”

“But you said—”

“Go to bed, Alice,” he cut her off. Dahn forced another smile and kneeled at Alice’s eye level. “I… have a lot of work to do, ok? I’m sorry. We’ll read it tomorrow.”

Alice nodded. “Ok.”

Dahn placed a soft kiss on a part of her forehead that wasn’t covered by thick, uneven bangs. “Good night.”

“G’night.”

With that, Alice walked off without further complaints, and Dahn watched, feeling his heart break a little. She didn’t ask for any help to get changed, or stubbornly insisted on being tucked in. She… didn’t even return the kiss like she always did. On one hand, that meant Alice was becoming more independent, which anyone-- especially him-- would have agreed to undoubtedly be a good thing. On the other, there was the feeling the first assumption brought that he couldn’t describe, tugging at a sense of sentimentality inside of his chest. One of his hands ran over his arm, clinging to his jacket. Dahn understood the disappointment Alice was feeling. But, no matter how soul-crushing it might’ve been for her and how much Dahn wished she didn’t have to experience it, he was ultimately powerless to do anything about it. 

He had work to worry about: Finding a new job, cleaning the house, catching up on schoolwork, buying groceries and such, and so much more things he knew needed to be done.

Alice will understand when she’s older, he told himself as he took out a cutting board from one of the kitchen drawers. He retrieved a knife and a couple of vegetables from the refrigerator and started to mince them. She’ll understand like I did.

A saucepan was filled with water up to ¾ and placed on the stove’s main burner at medium-high heat to bring it to a boil. Once it was ready, Dahn slid the minced vegetables into the water and admired them for a few seconds before placing a lid on the saucepan. His cutting work had gotten better. Five years ago, the only thing he knew how to make was Alice’s milk formula and sandwiches, but now he could make meals for his father, sister and himself with what was available. Five years ago, every recipe he attempted to make turned out too salty or sweet, burned or underdone, but now that ever rarely happened. Five years ago, he still cried out in frustration when there was no one there to tell him why the vegetables had gone bad so quickly, but now he only bit his lip while he tried to figure out what he had done wrong. Five years ago, he broke down every time he woke up and remembered his mother wasn’t there anymore, but now… He still did it, albeit less frequently, in the privacy of his room.

Dahn had learned endless things in the past five years, but above all else, the main most important thing he had learned was that, sometimes, some things needed to be sacrificed in order to make way for other, more important things. It was… just the way life worked.

But that didn’t change the fact he deeply wished spending time with Alice could be an exception.

Once the vegetables were done and a chicken flavor packet had been added to the mix, Dahn introduced a block of noodles into the saucepan and watched it slowly come to life in the broth, unravelling it further with a pair of clamps. He sprinkled in a bit of MSG as a last touch and served the final product in a bowl then placed on a wooden tray accompanied by a glass of water and a couple of napkins. The noodles had turned out good enough, he decided as he brought them to his father’s room. They smelled and looked appetizing, enough to make a semblance of hunger manifest itself in his stomach. Dahn didn’t acknowledge it, though; he had eaten not too long ago, so there was no reason to feel hungry.

Gently knocking on the door, he heard a muffled, almost inaudible ‘ come in’ from behind the door. Upon opening the door, he was met with pure darkness that consumed the room almost entirely if not for the sole source of light directly across from him in the form of an old desk lamp.

“Dad, I’m going to turn on the light,” Dahn said. He placed the tray on his father’s bed to his right and flipped the switch next to the door. Ah, much better.

His father didn’t say anything, only ran his hand over his eyes without bothering to take off his glasses.

“Are you going to eat right now?” His father turned to look at the food and then back at his desk filled with papers, seemingly unable to choose between them. “Ah, it’s ok if you don’t! Just make sure to microwave it if it gets cold by the time you start eating.”

His father nodded twice, turned back to his desk, and continued working. From where he stood, Dahn could tell he was currently writing, most likely drafting a story or revising one. He dared not get closer, though. His father’s workplace was and always had been off-limits for them, even before his mother had passed; in fact, Dahn wasn’t entirely sure if she could even watch his father work without immediately being asked to leave. She could have, but it was unlikely.

Although he had only come to deliver dinner and nothing more, for some reason Dahn didn’t see himself out once this task had been completed like he always did. He did take one step towards the door, but he stopped himself from reaching for the doorknob, hesitatingly turning his back at it. His eyes flickered from the door to his father’s hunched back and the floor.

“Dad… Can I ask you something?” He took the silence as a ‘yes’. “You… You didn’t get my message, did you? Back at the warehouse, I mean.”

The sound of his father’s pencil scribbling on paper stopped. The man’s head slowly rose without his back straightening much. Dahn let out a sigh and rubbed at the back of his head, averting his gaze.

“Yeah, I figured you didn’t. I mean, the lady that answered said you couldn’t come to the phone, so you must’ve been terribly busy for her to reach you—”

“—I did.”

Dahn blinked a couple of times. All traces of emotion disappeared from his face, leaving a blank expression. His brows creased together as his mind processed the two words that had come out of his father’s mouth, mouth parting slightly open. “What?”

“I did get your message.”

Something inside Dahn fell, but it wasn’t his expression, nor his hand that slammed against his jeans. No, it was something else. It sparked… a feeling, a sensation that hit so hard and so deep it would easily render any moment sour. It was the thing that bubbled within Dahn whenever a teammate didn’t do their part during an assignment, churning up his insides in preparation for the talk-down he was about to give said teammate. It was a feeling he had never expected to feel towards his father.

It was betrayal.

“So, you knew Alice was missing? And— and you just came back almost four, no, five hours later like nothing was wrong?”

Dahn’s father nodded to the first question but, as for the second one, he offered no response, seeming to be in deep thought. Dahn bit his lip, sending waves of acute pain across the bruised and still scalping area. He let his head dip forward, eyes on his stomach, where the first signs of nausea were starting to manifest.

“Why didn’t you come sooner?” he asked in a deadpan tone.

After what felt like hours of silence, his father finally spoke up. “I couldn’t.”

“You couldn’t.” If Dahn’s patience were a Jenga tower, then whoever was playing it seemed very keen on picking out all the wrong blocks that would eventually cause it to crumble to pieces, for some reason. Dahn threw his head up for a second, catching a glimpse of the ceiling, and let it fall back down again, which caused his bangs to hang like curtains that had been snipped by a child in front of him. His eyes closed shut with the same intensity as his frown. Dahn’s temper was steadily rising like magma crawling up a volcano’s insides— a volcano that had constantly expelled warning fumes in the past but never actually erupted in all its glory, spreading chaos and destruction upon anyone who dared stand in its way. There were a million thoughts racing through his mind, but all of them came back to a single word: Why?

Why didn’t he come home sooner? Why did he look so uninterested? Why didn’t he do anything when he got his message? Why didn’t he at least try to call him back? Why wasn’t he there when Dahn needed him? When Alice needed him? Why did he only speak in sentence fragments?

Why didn’t he seem to care ?

Dahn formed a shaky smile of disbelief. “I was working when Alice went missing, and I didn’t doubt for one second to drop everything the moment I felt something was wrong.” His eyes fluttered open with difficulty and turned to look directly at his father, who he saw was also focused on him. “Why couldn’t you ?”

Dahn had wished, hoped for his father to say something— to deny it and finally give him an explanation, to agree and apologize, to show guilt, anything. But he didn’t. Their gazes were locked onto each other, Dahn’s burning with anger he tried to press down, while his father’s eyes were dull, lifeless, as though there was nothing behind them but an endless void reflecting the desk lamp’s light. It was this kind of indifference, or what he assumed to be a lack of interest regarding his questions, that ticked Dahn off the most.

“Everything I do, I do it for her— I do it for you . I work so hard everyday because I know your job doesn’t pay enough for the three of us and that you’re focused on your book— a-and I know finishing it has been your main goal since mom died, but…” He bit his lip and clenched his fists, resisting the urge to pull more at his hair. “But it’s kind of hard to do it knowing you never do the same for us!”

A weight was placed on Dahn’s stomach the moment those words came out. He felt sick.

He drew quick, short breaths through his mouth, chest heaving slightly. I’ve done it now. Replaying the last sentence in his mind once again, it sounded outlandish to even consider. However, there was no taking it back. While a part of him panicked at having said it— those thoughts that had been brewing in the back of his mind for the past few years, pushed back time and time again under the guise of being foolish… Another part of him just didn’t have the will to continue putting up with it anymore. That part of him wanted to push it further.

“Did you ever care about Alice? Have you ever actually spent time with h-her?” Dahn’s voice broke, emphasizing every emotion it carried: Sadness, disappointment, betrayal. He scoffed, turning to the floor for a moment before looking back up at his father’s stern yet monotone face. “You can’t even say?” He let out a shaky breath. “Why am I even surprised? It’s not like you ever bothered to actually talk to us— to talk to me . You just stay locked up in here all day when you’re not at work. Why do you try so hard to avoid us? Do you hate us that much?!” Dahn realized his mouth was moving before his mind was even given a chance to process the words he said. His subconscious, somehow aware of what was coming, screamed for him to shut up, to apologize immediately to his father while he still could. He had already said so many things that were never meant to be heard, he only wanted it all to stop.

“Do you even know how bad I’m doing at school?” Stop it. Dahn’s tone grew taut, overflowing with anger that had completely blinded the rational part of himself.  “I’m not even sure I can even continue having my scholarship—” Shut up, “but of course, you wouldn’t know,” No, no, no, no—, “you’re too busy crying over mom to notice!”

His voice boomed across the inside of the room, probably loudly enough for it to be also heard on the other side of the apartment, inside his and Alice’s room, despite the closed doors and distance. Dahn came to his senses a few seconds afterwards. He first noticed how stiff and tense his muscles had been. His articulations practically creaked when he broke his position: Fists clenched at his sides, body leaning forward with his left foot ahead of the right one. His lip had curled up into a snarl while he spoke and, not only that, but his face also felt hot, especially his cheeks, which were tainted a bright red. Slowly, his muscles unwound. A hand clasped over Dahn’s open mouth. His widened eyes stared at nothing, inward eyebrows rising.

As though there had been a cut made in his memories, the last minute suddenly felt like a complete blur. The words he remembered hearing weren’t accompanied by any images, and thus he didn’t know for sure if they had even come out of his mouth or were a sick scenario his mind had conjured up. From the look of shock in his father’s face, though, was all the confirmation Dahn needed to know that, no, he hadn’t imagined anything. Everything had happened whether he liked it or not.

A cold realization began to settle inside of his chest, making it heavier and harder to breathe. It was a similar sensation to the moment just before a roller-coaster’s carts went down the first, and highest, drop, where one might wonder where they had gone wrong to be in said situation. Except Dahn hadn’t acted out of peer pressure or a need to prove himself as he could’ve in the roller-coaster scenario. He had done this to himself. It was him who had wanted to push the questions further until he inevitably touched a subject far too delicate to discuss with the likes of his father.

Dahn didn’t like it.

“I—I’m so sorry,” he said in a strangled voice. Everything started to spin, objects not illuminated by the light blending into a single mass of black and, those that were, fading out of focus. The world seemed to be closing in on him more every time he blinked. “I didn’t mean to, I—" He struggled to find the right words to apologize, but nothing that came to mind sounded right. When he finally thought he had found what to say, the words caught up in his throat instead.

His father stood up from his chair and began walking towards him. Dahn’s heart sunk lower into his stomach and started to beat faster, rushing blood through his veins at greater speeds than they had all day, even faster when he had first called Mr. Bowie from work. Eyes quickly shifting, not staying in one definite place for long, he inevitably locked eyes with his father. For a moment, for a single fraction of an instant, Dahn thought he saw a shift in his face. It wasn’t one of anger like he was expecting it to be, no— his father’s eyes were heartbroken. One could see a glint of grief within them if they looked hard enough, and Dahn did during that fleeting moment. His mind was too clouded with shame to completely notice, though. With every step his father took, he retreated one step back until he was back against the door. One of his hands looked for the doorknob, which he found with difficulty due to how much his hands were shaking, while the other clenched the area of his shirt right above his heart.

His father reached out a hand to him and Dahn winced, backing further against the door.

“Son, I…”

At that moment, Dahn managed to get the door to open. He didn’t hesitate to run out of it like his life depended on it which he was completely convinced it did. In the inside of his mind, horns and alarms blared back and forth, all telling him he needed to get out of his father’s sight immediately. Otherwise, he might die. Dahn was so sure he would die if he looked at his father in the face for another second. However, even when he escaped the room gasping for breath, the feeling of his imminent death didn’t diminish one bit— it only got stronger. His head turned desperately, looking for an exit, only to find Alice standing a few feet away from him. She had changed into her pass-me-down, mint green nightgown and carried a stuffed rabbit by its arm. Her head tilted ever so slightly sideways.

“ Kuya? Why are you crying?”

Dahn held back a gasp by biting his lip and backed away, holding up an arm in front of himself. Not her. Not her, please, he pleaded in his mind, for the only sounds that could come out of him were strangled yelps and sobs. He tripped on the shoes in the entrance, causing him to trip and fall less than gently on his backside. The pain from the fall wasn’t as intense as the one coming from his chest, nor the throbbing headache splitting his head in two; if truth to be told, Dahn didn’t feel it. He forced himself to his feet regardless of the acute pain the action shot through his head.  

“ Kuya ?” Alice called again with worry in her voice. A door opened afterwards. Dahn caught the figure of his father coming out of his room from the former of his eye. Seeing both his sister and father were quickly closing in on him, Dahn didn’t bother with putting any shoes on as he scrambled to open the entrance door. A cold, fresh breeze of air hit his face, pushing his bangs out of the way while also giving a couple of tears the impulse to run down his cheeks.

His father spoke up over the cacophony of sounds buzzing inside of Dahn’s head. “Dahn, I’m so—”

Dahn felt his last string of self-control snap. A pair of hands came up to cover his ears and, without hesitation, he dashed out of the apartment and down the stairs, practically slipping his way down to the reception. He arrived at the first floor in less than five seconds and wasted no time in getting back up and resuming his running. Mr. Bowie said something the moment he saw Dahn run past him, but he ultimately wasn’t heard. 

Once outside, Dahn simply kept running. He didn’t know where he was going but his mind told him that, if he just kept going, he would eventually arrive there. There weren’t that many people out and about at ten in the afternoon, and it somewhat made him feel a little relieved. Still, a lack of people didn’t exactly mean a lack of cars: A total of four drivers honked at him and two barely avoided running him over. Dahn knew he was deliberately not looking at the colour of the light when he ran into the crossroads, but he couldn’t manage to care enough to do it. 

New York was as illuminated during the night as it was during the day, yet Dahn’s vision only got darker as he ran. Black spots danced in his vision; his legs felt the weakest they had ever been in days. Lifting his gaze from the floor for the first time since he had escaped from the apartments, he noticed he had wound up in a badly lit street. Few shops if any were open except for a pharmacy in the distance and a couple of convenience stores. The other buildings were closed by graffiti-filled roll-down gates. Dahn was completely alone save for the stray dogs, cats and people that were most likely luring in the darkness. The moment he stopped, his legs finally gave out and he collapsed on a closed store’s steps. Tears freely flowed down his cheeks. Dahn hyperventilated with lost eyes, chest and head aching. I’m going to die , he repeated to himself. 

As those words echoed inside his mind, emotion rose up again. His throat closed up and even more tears bloomed in his eyes. Disconnected from what was happening around him, Dahn pulled his arms and legs together into a foetal position. He wondered how much more pathetic he could get.

Enclosed by total darkness, he let himself come undone, muttering apologies that were heard by nobody but him.

Chapter Text

Dahn was startled awake by a light tap on his shoulder, realizing that, at some point, he had fallen asleep on the cold, partially dank concrete steps. The tears on his cheeks had long dried up and his heartbeat was tamer than it had been a moment ago, but time only seemed to have advanced several minutes forward, an hour at most. He rubbed his tired and dry eyes, trying to determine where he was. It wasn’t somewhere familiar, he quickly concluded. No place he knew smelled like burned plastic with a whiff of gasoline. His brows creased, and he pinched the bridge of his nose at the dull throb in his head that prevented him from fully assessing the situation, almost as if he were suffering from a hangover. In a matter of seconds, memories began flooding back with the gentleness of a wrecking ball tearing through a wall until Dahn was able to piece together how he had gotten there. He groaned under his breath. What a mess…

Sitting up, he noticed someone sitting beside him. He was taken aback due to how close to him this person was, retreating in a mild panic to rectify this. His heart shot up from his chest, forcing him to draw a sharp breath. The other person, however, didn’t seem affected by his reaction at all, not even when Dahn suddenly pulled away. Just by her figure alone, he felt a certain familiarity with them, one that he only understood by drawing slightly closer and squinting his eyes. Even under the cloak of darkness, such an ugly-yellow color would be hard to miss, especially when it was the main color in a dress. 

“Oh, good. You’re awake,” the person said. The sound of her voice was that of relief and cheer, pleasant to hear: It went completely against the dark atmosphere of the street they were in. “You were out for some time— I was starting to worry.” Dahn could hear her smile through her words, which only made him more suspicious of the woman. 

“Who are you?” Dahn asked out of confusion. He had seen her before, but where? School? Work? The street? All were plausible answers, and he couldn’t decide which was right.

“I’m Kat.” She responded almost immediately, a little too quickly for Dahn. At the mention of her name, she extended her hand towards him. However, not a second after, she drew it back to her lap, a look on her face as if she had suddenly remembered something. “Whoops, forgot you don’t really like to shake hands.” She chuckled. “Silly me.”

Dahn was taken aback by her remark. What she had said was true— he didn’t like to shake hands. As to how she knew this extremely specific detail about him, Dahn had no clue and, in all fairness, he had no intention of finding out. He narrowed his eyes at her, creasing his brows. “O-k. I don’t know what you want with me, but I really need to go. Goodbye.”

Kat watched Dahn stand up and start to walk away, getting up herself shortly thereafter. She trotted up to him, her hands tucked behind her back and head slightly cocked towards him trying to get a good view of Dahn’s face. “Go where?” 

“Why should I tell you?” Dahn barely turned his head to look at Kat, merely eyeing her, annoyed and uneasy she was following him. 

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” Kat said, “I just wanted to know.” Her voice was matter-of-factly and didn’t show any ulterior motives to it, like a child innocently asking questions others were obligated to answer. Dahn remained silent, turning his gaze down in hopes it would make Kat’s presence less noticeable. It didn’t. “I mean, it’s not every day that I find someone sleeping on the ground in the middle of the night.”

“And it’s not every day that I wake up after a panic attack to someone watching me.”

Kat laughed softly. “Touché.”

Against all of Dahn’s self-control, he found himself smirking at her comment. The conversation dried up rather quickly, but they continued walking together nevertheless, Dahn always two steps ahead of Kat. Their steps were in strange synchrony both in timing and speed, another thing Dahn was conflicted about. With how quiet Kat had suddenly become, not only did it sound as if he were walking alone, but it also felt like he was alone. The fact that he knew this wasn’t the case and that Kat was most certainly walking behind him with a misplaced smile on her face made the hairs on the back of his neck stand. He couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, get her smiling face out of her mind, the worst part being the smile didn’t look forced at all— it was genuine. In the depths of his mind, he wondered what would happen if he started to run as fast as he could. Would he lose her? Or would she suddenly zip past him at speeds greater than the ones within his capacity?

Dahn did neither of them, of course, but he couldn’t help but ask himself those questions. 

Guided by a gut feeling which told him when to turn at what corner of the street they were navigating, Dahn slowly made his way into a more familiar part of the city. At least there were now cars and potential witnesses to testify in court if Kat were to, hypothetically, try something ‘funny’ at any moment. He eventually recognized a park he had once taken Alice to and began to mentally map his way back to the apartment from there.

“So, you never told me where we’re going,” Kat said, making Dahn jump mid-step and stop dead on his tracks.

“ We? I don’t remember saying you could come with me.”

“Hmm… True, but you also didn’t say anything about me not following you, so I guess it checks out!” Dahn held himself back from face-palming at her logic. His fingers pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Look, Kat, I really just want to be alone right now. Could you please, I don’t know… Go do something else, maybe?”

The smile on Kat’s face turned into a straight line, her wide grey-ish blue eyes blinking a couple of times. Dahn pursed his lips and stuffed his hands inside of his jacket’s pockets. Upon seeing Kat was no longer smiling, he averted his gaze from her, turning back to the street; her neutral face was somehow much creepier than her smiling one. 

“Goodbye.” He cut himself off before saying ‘It was nice to meet you.’

Kat didn’t start walking with him this time; she simply stood there, silent but still observing. Dahn, however, didn’t relax a bit. Kat’s eyes were drilling onto the back of his skull— he could feel the making him bite his lip and unconsciously pick up the pace of his walking. In the distance, he caught sight of a convenience store. That would have to do. Just as he was preparing to sprint for it, he heard Kat’s voice over the sound of the passing cars and insects chirping in the background.

“It’s ok, I understand, Dahn. I would also want to be alone after such a fight with my parents.”

Dahn felt the whole world stop moving, which also included himself. His blood ran cold as his heart skipped a beat, a terrible sensation of dread coursing through his entire being. He slowly turned his head back around just in time to see the shape of Kat’s lips shift back into that of a smile. The sight only made his heart sink further into his stomach. 

She nonchalantly started to walk towards him, her ridiculously long hair swaying from side to side resembling a bride’s veil.

Previously shrouded in darkness, she stepped directly under a streetlight allowing Dahn to finally look at her with clarity. She was tall, almost a little too much, probably just grazing the same height as some of the guys in his grade. Her height was complemented by the simple one-piece dress she wore: It had no imprints on it, with long sleeves slightly puffed up around the shoulders, ending little past her knees where a pair of fluffy, white leg warmers started. Despite looking to be rather ordinary, she somehow managed to seamlessly instill fear into Dahn, like this wasn’t the first time she had been in this same situation. The only thing that scared him more than her creepy smile was the fact that this was most likely true.

Dahn couldn’t bring himself to run or move an inch of his body as if the pure shock of hearing his name come out of her mouth had petrified him. Her footsteps matched with every thump his heart gave, the sound of them getting louder the more she approached, echoing inside of his head. 

She finally stopped just in front of Dahn and leaned down so that their faces were at the same level, inches away from each other. Her hair cascaded at her sides, wavy curtains of blonde, almost white if she were to stand directly under a light source. She grinned. The color in Dahn’s face drained.

“You shouldn’t bite your lip that much, you know? It’ll leave a really bad scar.”

Kat straightened herself, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, at which point Dahn snapped out of the fear induced spell and staggered backwards. His incessantly beating heart made him pant lightly as his brows creased into a frown.

“What the hell are you?!” He tried his best to sound intimidating. From the way Kat softly laughed in response, it was highly ineffective. 

“I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re worried about. You could say I’m a ‘friend’.” Dahn scoffed. “You don’t know me, but I know you. I know all there is to know about you. And what I want to do… Is to help you, Dahn.” Kat clasped his hands together but Dahn smacked them away aggressively. 

“Don’t touch me!”

“S-sorry!” Kat quickly bowed her head as she kept her hands close to her chest. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me, really, usually I’m not this forgetful. Tell me, is there anything else you would like me to not do?”

“ Yes , there is one actually,” Dahn said. “Don’t follow me.” 

Just as the last work fell out of his lips, he bolted at full speed away from Kat. Despite not being equipped to pull this off, overwhelming waves of adrenaline along with the thought that slowing down would mean his definite demise gave power to his sore and tired legs. If only for a few seconds, he completely forgot they were hurting in the first place and ran like he had never in his life. He ran without stopping for breath for a full minute, making turns at every corner and pedestrian crossing he came across. He pushed past the few people walking the streets and occasionally glanced over his shoulder to check for Kat. Once he ran out of breath and the pain in his abdomen forced him to stop running, Dahn jogged into a backstreet and leaned against its brick walls. 

“I think I lost her…” he said to himself in between wheezes. 

“Aw, why would you run in the middle of a conversation?” Dahn whipped his head to the right only to see none other than Kat standing there, towering over him like a cat over a mouse. He could only muster a yelp of surprise as he scrambled to start running again and his heart picked up a second time. Almost another minute of running later, Dahn found himself near the mall he used to work at. However, there weren’t any people around nor was it open, for that matter. Its doors were shut and the interior black, which shattered the bits of hope seeing the place had initially given Dahn. His eyes scanned the place for a security guard on patrol but found none. He jumped in his place for a couple of seconds, pondering where to go next. The destination didn’t really matter, of course, the detours he took to get there did. I

“Seriously, you really ought to learn some manners about conversation,” Kat said from behind him.

And Dahn was back at running yet again. Each and every time he thought he was safe, Kat somehow magically appeared next to him sporting a smile Dahn was growing to both hate and dread seeing. Her ways of transportation were an enigma, especially since she never appeared to grow tired which, if she were running at the same speeds as him, she would’ve undoubtedly been.

Finally, Dahn collapsed on a patch of grass after a good fifteen or so minutes of running and failing to escape from Kat. Footsteps approached him and stopped upon reaching him, but Dahn didn’t have the strength to even lift up his head. His fingers trembled, his legs burned like an old locomotive’s oven, and Dahn waited for the moment his heart also decided to shut down as the rest of his body— he wouldn’t even be mad if it did. His ringing ears heard Kat crouch beside him. A slender finger poked his shoulder.

“Hey Dah— friend. Are you there?”

He groaned in response. I can’t move. Everything hurts so bad. 

“Can you hear me?”

Huh. Kat suddenly sounded very muffled. Dahn opened his eyes with difficulty, noticing he couldn’t focus them due to the obnoxious presence of white sparks and blobs of black dispersed along his range of vision. They were promptly closed. On the brink of his mind completely slipping away, a pair of hands— Kat’s— was placed over his legs. They felt warm against his skin, their touch gentle yet their grasp firm like that of a doctor administering a shot on a patient. The temperature in the area being touched gradually began to increase at a pace barely noticeable by Dahn’s exhausted mind until it was a dash below unbearable. Dahn winced, biting his lip.

Then, the hands moved from his legs to his head and gave it the same treatment.

“There,” Kat said, “That should be enough. I’m not really used to relieving muscles, so, can you tell me if they still hurt?”

Dahn’s eyes fluttered open. He blinked a couple of times and managed to distinguish Kat’s legwarmers and shoes almost immediately. A groan escaped from his lips as he pulled himself up with minimal difficulty. His head didn’t complain this time and the world around him didn’t start revolving the moment he looked around him. For a moment, he was mesmerized by the sight of the park being illuminated by streetlights; how the artificial light bathed a nearby dirt road in a warm shade of orange and yellow. Dahn could’ve sworn he hadn’t seen his surroundings this clearly before.

“So? How do you feel?”

Kat’s words made him give a flurry of blinks and narrow his eyes. He turned to her. His eyes couldn’t help but widen at what he saw.

It was Kat, but she didn’t exactly look like the girl that had been chasing Dahn around all night anymore. Of course, her hair was still exceptionally long and cascaded around her, her creepy smile was still there, and she still wore those very tacky looking, white fluffy legwarmers. However, the collection of small white feathers growing above her cheekbones and her forehead had not been there before. When he finally managed to snap his eyes away from her face, Dahn noticed another detail about Kat’s appearance: From her back sprouted a pair of wings with a purely white underside and black spots on the outside. He forcefully blinked and squinted his eyes just to confirm what he saw were, indeed, wings. They were backlit, which gave them an overall ethereal look Dahn was captivated and intimidated by: Enormous, powerful, graceful… His gaze was fixed on Kat’s wings, his mind going miles per hour as it tried to process what his eyes were seeing. She’s not human.

Kat playfully smiled and made her wings abruptly expand a little more. Dahn gasped and backed away in response, an arm brought up in front of his chest. This prompted Kat to break out into a fit of laughter. She fell back from her crouching position with a soft bump, leaning back on her arms and allowing her wings to fully extend on the grass as she laughed with her head thrown back.

When Dahn found his voice, the only words to escape his mouth were, in a voice barely above a whisper, “What are you?” He had been asking himself who she was and what she wanted with him from the moment he had met her in the backstreet, but right now, that was the only question he wanted to be answered.

Kat forced her laughter to die down prematurely, swallowing a few giggles. “Sorry, sorry, I just couldn’t help myself!” She took a deep breath. “Ok, ok, I think I’m good now.”

She stood up, tucking her wings behind her, a gust of wind playing with the ends of her hair.

“Can’t you tell? I’m your guardian angel, silly!”

The sound of crickets chirping in the park’s bushes and trees was the only thing that broke the tense atmosphere between Kat and Dahn, so thick it could be cut with a knife. Both sat on a bench whose cheap white paint was chipped and broken, definitely not a place one would like to sit on wearing shorts. Not a word was said, and no exchanges were done, none had been for a while. Dahn kept his legs almost completely closed and his hands on his knees. He, despite looking down, could tell Kat wasn’t smiling anymore. Her head looked up at the sky with what could only be longing, eyes reflecting the void that was the starless mantle of darkness looming above them. 

She had turned back into a more human look not long after having revealed herself to him.

“It wouldn’t be wise for other humans to see me like this,” Kat had said. 

Dahn then watched with morbid amazement how her wings became smaller and smaller until their size allowed them to be hidden behind her waterfall of hair. The feathers on her face and hands were absorbed back into her body and, just like that, Kat appeared human once again. However, as the saying went, what is once seen cannot be unseen and so, the chances of Dahn ever forgetting Kat was no human were zero to none. Between meeting Kat, being chased around the city and the present, his mind felt so tremendously exhausted it couldn’t afford to be afraid of not knowing what was going to happen to him. The fact Kat wouldn’t allow him to leave no matter what he did was set on stone, which relegated Dahn’s options to one: Hope that another person would pass by and work the details out from there. With the time quickly approaching midnight, though, he figured this would be highly unlikely. He was completely and utterly helpless against… whatever Kat truly was. The thought made Dahn’s frown deepen. 

His heart wanted to scream out in frustration, but every time his mouth opened, the fear of the possible consequences shut every part of his body down. It only made him want to scream even louder.

“The sky here is so dark,” she said. “Not a single star.” Her voice carried a certain disappointment Dahn had once related to when he had been much younger. Dahn, suddenly snapped out of his thoughts, turned his head up as well and, as Kat said, saw only darkness. His face stayed the same. “I’m so used to seeing millions of stars every night it’s… bizarre to see a sky without them. Don’t you get lonely without them, too?”

He shrugged. Dahn refused to turn to Kat and returned to the safety of looking at the ground. One of his legs kicked a small pebble. “I guess.”

“You know? I always like to fly around dusk. When the sun has already disappeared beneath the horizon or is about to. The sky changes colors in one of the most beautiful ways.” Kat smiled fondly. “You should do it one day, too.”  He scoffed. 

“And how do you suppose I’ll do that?”

Dahn’s eyes peered upwards to see her expression slightly fall. Kat fell silent. Seconds that felt like hours of complete silence passed, essentially bringing their conversation back to square one. Kat was the first one to speak up, again, but this time to pose a question.

“Dahn— I mean, friend, please be sincere with me. Are you happy as you are right now?”

Kat’s question caused him to furrow his brows. Happiness?

“I’m being basically held hostage by a…” he gestured at Kat with his hand and paused for a moment. “Whatever you are… so, I’ll have to say no.”

Her lips were pursed into a thin line. “That’s not what I meant. Are you happy with your life?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know…” he muttered. Dahn’s head lowered even more, hair shrouding the sides of his face. “For all I know, this might just be a dream and, next thing I know, I’ll wake up in Biology and be sent outside for sleeping in class again.”

“I take it that’s not something you enjoy.”

“No one does,” Dahn sharply replied.

Kat huffed, weakly smiling. “Heh. I understand why. Your teachers are always so mean when they talk to you.” Dahn shot her a look but ultimately kept his questions in his mind as he had already realized there would be no point in asking any. Kat cleared her throat and puffed out her chest so that she appeared to be looking down on someone. Then, in an authoritative tone exaggerated to sound as strident and condescending as a middle-aged white woman named Karen, she said, “ ‘ Ah, Dan, you failed another test, I see. I shall ignore you were clearly sleep deprived and the fact that I only gave you a total of twelve minutes to answer it, and I will continue to do this until your GPA is sadder than my love life. Now, go sit down while I complain about the broken state of capitalism for the rest of the class. ’ ” 

Now, Dahn wasn’t one to laugh when others made fun of their teachers— he never had been, in fact. There was something, however, about the mixture of deliberate mockery, Kat’s face and how accurate her portrayal of his Chemistry professor was, that caused him to break out into a short-lived fit of laughter. The sensations it brought forth were pure and felt strangely good, even new in a way. Kat smiled, satisfied at the reactions her impersonation had earned her. “Something like that, right?” she asked. 

“Spot on. You’re still super creepy, though.” 

Kat chuckled nervously. “Eh, not the worst thing someone has called me. But, still, do you see what I mean? I wouldn’t want to put up with a woman like that every single day, and I’m sure neither would you—  yet, you still do.” 

“Well, it’s not like I have much of an option, do I?” 

“Except you do.”

Kat took a deep breath and assumed a tranquil look Dahn didn’t feel too bothered by. 

She furrowed her brows as she closed her eyes, appearing to be concentrated on doing something Dahn didn’t understand yet. In front of her chest, she clasped her hands together into a closed dome. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds, but then, light began to shine from inside of Kat’s hands, at which point she opened them to reveal a small orb of warm light, perfectly round and alive, floating between them. Dahn’s eyes were captivated by its glow, beyond anything he had ever seen in his life. Kat gently threw her hands upwards, and both watched the orb float a few feet up into the air before suddenly exploding into hundreds if not thousands of tiny specks of light like a firework. These fragments slowly fell at different paces, each growing thinner and smaller until completely disappearing at Dahn’s eye level. 

Without even thinking about it, he raised one of his hands towards the flecks of light. One of them fell on his palm. Dahn barely caught a glimpse of it before it completely disappeared, leaving him staring at his palm with starry eyes. He turned back at the shower of light above. It felt as though there was a giant chandelier suspended above them, its light beautifully refracting on the ornament’s crystal prisms’ every cut before turning into snowflakes of light that lived for mere seconds. A warm, fuzzy sensation settled around his chest and overtook him, enveloping him completely in the moment. Even when the light had completely been extinguished, he remained entranced by it: Mouth slightly open as his eyes traced the light’s snowfall like it was still there.

Kat looked away, placed her hands on her lap and, without hesitation or doubt, she said, “I know you are not happy.”

Effectively catching him off guard, Kat’s bold words caused a pit to form in his stomach and his eyes to widen just enough for it to be noticeable.

Dahn stood up without altering his gaze away from Kat but still taking a few steps away from her for good measure. “Why would you say something like that so suddenly…?” His voice was breathy, a confused laugh mixed with the need to be firm in order to make up for the moment of weakness he had allowed himself to show. “What do you know?”

She locked gazes with him, wearing an expression on her face he was completely unable to read. It wasn’t pitying like Mr. Williams’ whenever he and Dahn engaged in conversation, nor did it seem to be prying to elicit a certain kind of reaction. He searched for a certain change in her position, a certain movement of her brows, a shift in the way her eyebrows were creased together— any clue that would lead him to discovering the hidden ulterior motive behind every basic action. However, no matter how much his eyes scanned Kat, he only found there was nothing to be ‘found’. 

“I am an Angel of Light, guardians of all beings— everything that houses a soul, no matter its size or shape. It’s our sole duty to bring hope to those who have lost it so faith of a brighter future can be restored across all lands,” she said. “I’ve been observing you for some time now. Even if you can’t see me or notice me, I’m there, watching over you and those around you.”

A memory crossed Dahn’s mind and, with it, a realization. “You… You were at the mall today.” Kat nodded in agreement. “And— at school, too?” Another nod. “ Work ?” She thought for a moment before giving a series of quick nods. Suddenly, a lot of things made more sense, and Dahn was both amazed and disgusted by this new piece of information— mostly the latter.

“I’ve wanted to properly talk to you for so long, there are so many things to discuss, so many things I’ve wanted to tell you about…” She stepped towards him. He took one step back. “Friend, you’re in so much pain. I can feel just how much you’ve been hurting inside in silence for so long.” Every few words, Kat attempted to close the distance between them but Dahn simultaneously retreated, not about to let this happen. 

“But it’s okay now,” she continued, “I’m here to make sure you never have to feel that way again.”

Dahn tripped over one of his shoelaces, which had come undone at some point while he ran from Kat. His arms flailed for a second before he fell. Kat stood in front of him in a matter of blinks and increasingly rapid heartbeats. 

“Although we aren’t allowed much interaction with humans, there is an exception. If a human is unhappy with their life, a guardian angel will give them a choice. A choice to start over.” She extended her hand towards him, lightly crouching. “This world is no place for someone like you. Come with me. I’ll take you to where you will never be discontent ever again.”

Only one word escaped his mouth, brows furrowed and eyes wide. “Where?”

Kat smiled. “Home.”

Chapter Text

Dahn’s eyes flickered between looking at Kat’s face and her hand, ultimately settling on the latter. 

Ever since Dahn had met her, Kat had only spoken in kind, warm words that didn’t seem to hide anything behind them. Although she possessed somewhat… inhuman attributes as well as tendencies only describable as that of a stalker— which he was starting to think Kat was unaware of—, she hadn’t actually done anything to harm him in any way. In fact, she had healed him not too long ago and introduced herself as his ‘guardian angel’ shortly thereafter. Yet, despite everything, Dahn couldn’t bring himself to trust her and her words. There was this feeling, a hitch in his gut that told him he would be striking a deal with the Devil if he were to accept the gesture. The fact taking Kat’s hand looked inviting, like it was the only correct action within the infinite number of ways he could respond, only made even more chills run down his spine.

What would happen, he asked himself, if he took Kat’s hand? Would he be taken to Kat’s ‘home’? What and where was ‘home’, anyway? Was it heaven? If this was the case, would he have to die, then? He had so many questions he wanted to ask, but time was still ticking, and Dahn seemed to be running out of time to respond to Kat’s offer. 

His face hardened and, after a couple more seconds of thinking, Dahn pushed away Kat’s hand, careful not to be rash when doing so. He took a deep breath. 

“I’m sorry,” said Dahn in a serious tone, “but I can’t.” Kat blinked. She looked genuinely surprised at his answer. “I just can’t do what you’re asking me to.”

“But of course, you can! It’s very simple— and you won’t need to pack anything—!”

“—That’s not the problem!” Dahn paused to collect his thoughts for a moment. His eyes averted from looking at Kat’s, already aware of the stare Kat was most likely giving him after interrupting her. “While I’m very honored that you even decided to give me this opportunity and went through so much trouble to present it to me, I can’t suddenly disappear and leave everything behind to go with you.” I can’t leave them behind. “Thank you, Kat, I’m really grateful. But I’m going to ask you to please give this opportunity to someone else who truly needs it. I…I’m really sorry.” He bowed his head and kept it low as he stood up. 

Through his bangs, Dahn was able to see her curious eyes, looking up at him from Kat’s still crouching position. A voice inside of his head told him she could see his own eyes, too, fidgeting and unable to focus on anything. His muscles tensed, fists clenched, and he bit his lip. Silence.

Dahn kept quiet, waiting for a response; however, no matter how long he waited, no harsh words like the ones he expected to hear ever came. Instead, he got the opposite.

“Friend, is that really what you want?” Kat asked calmly. She sounded similar to a mother confirming whether a toy she was about to buy for her child was indeed the one they wanted.

“What?”

“You told me to reconsider offering this choice to someone else, yet you didn’t think twice to reject it.” Kat rose up, regaining her height advantage. Dahn shyly eyed her and noticed she didn’t appear to be angry, no— if her expression was anything to go by, she seemed, if anything, hurt. Her chin dipped and her hands clasped together in front of her, squeezing each other. “To be completely honest with you, I’m obligated not to give anyone else these kinds of offers— even if I wanted to. It’s just a select few we are allowed to contact, and you are part of them.” A sour and unpleasant sensation settled in Dahn’s stomach at Kat’s last statement.

“I… I didn’t know.”

“It’s ok,” said Kat with an apologetic smile, head slightly tilted to the side. “You couldn’t have known, now that I think about it…” she added in a lower voice, a hand clasped under her chin as she thought. Suddenly, her face and eyes lit up. “Friend, if I showed you the reason why you were chosen, would you be willing to reconsider?”

Dahn’s ear perked up at her choice of words. “A ‘reason’?” Chosen?

Kat nodded. “Yes. Behind every soul that is offered what I just did to you, there is a reason, a reason why they were chosen in the first place.” Again, she extended her hand towards Dahn. “If I show it to you, will you reconsider my offer?”

Faced with yet another choice, Dahn felt the whole world go silent and slow down to a full stop. On one hand, he could refuse yet again. This was his safest option. However, on the other hand, he was somewhat inclined towards hearing what Kat had to say out of curiosity and by the fact he still wasn’t fully prepared to go back home. Just the thought of going back to the apartment and inevitably having to face his father made his heart sink and his stomach churn.

His brows furrowed and he bit his lip. His hand harshly crashed against Kat’s, squeezing it tightly. 

“Fine. Show me.” It won’t hurt to know, he thought. In the end, I’m the one with the final say. A part of him, however, wasn’t so sure about this statement.

Kat’s eyes shined. “Thank you, friend.” 

Dahn quickly pulled his hand away and tucked it inside of his jacket’s pocket.

“So, what are you going to show me?”

“Right! Hm…” Kat quickly turned her head in all directions, pursing her lips into a thin line. “We need to go somewhere else, first.”

Dahn furrowed his brows in confusion. “Ok… where exactly?”

“You’ll see.”

Kat closed her eyes, and, in the blink of an eye, feathers sprouted along her forehead, cheekbones and the back of her hands. At the same time, her wings exploded from her back with a fwoosh! A number of fluffy, loose feathers flew into the air as her wings fully extended, falling onto her clothes, hair, and the ground. Dahn was able to get a proper look at Kat’s wings and, for the first time, realized their incredible scale. Being fairly close to Kat, he theorized there were probably more than 150 centimeters between her wingtips and the wing’s connection to her back. It boggled his mind the way Kat had managed to make them disappear so effortlessly.

They gave a couple of experimental flaps causing even more feathers to come off and her hair to fly around her as if she were underwater. It was then Dahn saw Kat had another set of wings, albeit much smaller than her other ones, positioned where her ear should be, poking out of her cascade of hair. He refrained from commenting on them but noted how they looked to be just as articulate as the other, bigger pair. Kat stretched her arms above her head, both couples of wings stretching, seemingly unconsciously, in unison. She heavily exhaled, appearing to be much more relaxed than a few moments ago.

“We’ll have to be quick,” she said, “it’s kind of far from here.”

Kat wasted no time with further explanations and positioned herself behind him, arms coming around his waist to tightly grip it. Her legs flexed deeply while her wings unfurled like those of an owl or eagle about to take flight. Wait. It was at this moment that a cold realization settled in Dahn’s stomach with the form of nauseating dread.

“Wait, wait, wait you’re not going to do what I think you’re about to do, right?” Eyes wide, he chuckled nervously. His heart sank deeper into the Earth the moment he saw Kat smirked, eyes dead set on the sky. 

“Hang on.” 

“Oh god, Kat, don’t— seriously, I’m begging you, no, nono nononoONONONO— ”

With one powerful downstroke of her wings that bit into the air, Kat released the impulse she had built up in her legs and, before Dahn could mentally prepare himself for the inevitable, they thrusted into the air at full force. He instinctively wrapped his hands around Kat’s as he let out a scream of raw, unfiltered fear. His legs flailed uncontrollably, feet desperately searching for something— anything to step on. Kat flapped her wings one, two, three, four, five, six times, and with each impulse they went higher into the sky. Dahn, meanwhile, refused to see how the world below them grew smaller and smaller, shutting his eyes close instead.

The air pushed his hair out of his face and was painfully cold against his cheeks as though a fan set at its highest setting were being held directly in front of him. This sensation only worsened when they were suddenly engulfed by something Dahn could only assume to be a cloud. The sensation reminded him of walking through the mountains back when he was a child, his father at his side; when the fog was thick, and the sun was about to rise on the horizon behind groves of trees. He shivered. Just like the fog from the Philippines, the cloud was somewhat hard to breathe in and peppered his face with droplets of water on his cheeks, nose and eyelashes. One of his eyes meekly opened. There was nothing but light grey, seemingly all around them. It is a cloud, then. How high are we?!

He didn’t know and, in all honesty, he didn’t want to know. What he did know, however, was that Kat continued to flap her wings and didn’t show any signs of stopping any time soon. 

After what felt like an eternity of uncertainty, they finally emerged from the cloud. Dahn gave a desperate gasp for air, followed by coughing; he had unknowingly been holding it back for however long they had been inside the prison of moisturized air.

“WHAT THE FU—?! ”

“Look.”

“Huh?” He narrowed his eyes at her, giving her an ‘ are you serious? ’ look. 

“Just look,” repeated Kat.

Dahn reluctantly did as he was told, seeing he had no other option, expecting to be met with nothing but fuel for the vertigo brooding inside him. At that moment, his heart almost jumped out of his chest. They flew above a vast ocean made of fluffy clouds colored all shades of blue imaginable as they reflected the light of the moon above them. They extended as far as the eye could see, covering anything and everything that might’ve been underneath them. He momentarily forgot about the cold seeping under his shirt and allowed his eyes to completely widen at the sight before him. His mouth opened in unison, sharing the awe that twinkled in the teen’s eyes.

“Wow.” A blow of air condensed when Dahn opened his mouth.

“Oh, and you haven’t seen the best part yet,” Kat chuckled. She adopted a mischievous smile and said, “Hang on.”

With a single beat of her wings, she swerved her body to the right, taking an abrupt dive towards one of the clouds at full speed. Dahn gave a yelp of surprise, again gripping onto her arms as the world turned sideways and they seamlessly broke through the white and blue mountain that stood above the other clouds. Meanwhile, Kat whooped and laughed, inciting Dahn to do the same. 

“Relax a little, come on! There’s nothing to be afraid of!” Dahn gave her an unsure look. “Look, right before we go into that cloud, open your arms. You’re going to love it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I usually do it all the time, but my arms are kind of busy right now, so…” Kat motioned to Dahn, a nervous smile on her face. “Anyway, just do it for me, ok?”

While they spoke, they had continued to get closer and closer to the aforementioned cloud until there were just a few meters before they inevitably collided against it. Kat’s face lit up. “Ok! Here we go!”

The seconds that followed happened in slow motion. Dahn debated back and forth inside his head, his hands going back and forth between letting go her arms and tightening their grip on them. At the last moment, Dahn shut his eyes as tightly as possible and, without allowing himself to think about it any further, extended his arms. His arms were stiff and the hesitance in their movements was noticeable— not to mention his stomach also sank into the deepest pits of Hell— but Kat appeared to be satisfied with the attempt, nonetheless. 

“Yeah! That’s it!”

Dahn slowly opened his eyes and realized they had already gone in and out of the cloud. There was something else, though. He could feel his whole body being lifted by the air rushing underneath him. It granted Dahn the sensation of floating on his own accord, one that was only broken by the pressure Kat’s arms excreted onto his waist. He looked down and saw their shadows being cast on top of the clouds— mainly Kat’s: Her wings powerfully extended, gracefully— and silently— gliding across the air like sharp scissors on paper for a few seconds before going back to beating for lift to continue being created. Dahn turned his head to look at Kat just in time to catch her doing the same. They stared at each other in silence until Kat burst out laughing.

“Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I wasn’t staring,” Dahn instantly shot back with a frown.

“You were.”

“Liar.”

“Were, too.” She giggled at the confused and flustered expression Dahn gave her. “Wait, don’t tell me.” Kat paused and then gasped. “You think I’m pretty.”

Dahn’s face scrunched up, lip curling up and eyes narrowing at the statement. “What—? Ew , no!”

“Yes, you do,” Kat said in a mocking tone.

“No, I don’t!”

“Well, while I’m very flattered for the interest, I’ve already committed myself to a mate. So, I’m going to have to politely accept your compliments but reject the possibility of anything else.”

“I never said anything remotely like that!” said Dahn as offended as can be. He slammed down his fists midair, his face starting to redden as he continued to speak. “I don’t like you and I never have, so please stop insinuating I do!”

Kat laughed again, wiping a small tear with her shoulder. “Stars, can’t you take a joke? I was teasing you.”

Looking away from her, Dahn crossed his arms. “Well— I—” He groaned. “Forget it.”

“Hey, it’s ok. I shouldn’t have said something like that in the first place, either. I… just thought it would make you laugh. Heh. Guess I failed, didn’t I?” Her voice trailed off towards the end. She gazed down at the clouds and fell silent, something— maybe a memory or thought— brewing inside of her mind. With a couple of blinks, though, she quickly shook off whatever came to mind and turned back to Dahn. “Say, you want to try something really fun?”

“Uh… I can’t say I won’t regret this—"

“—Oh, you probably will.”

“— but yeah, sure.” Dahn processed what Kat said a couple of seconds too late. “ Wait— ” 

“Ok! Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”

Kat let go of him and, the next thing Dahn knew, he was falling through the clouds, who did nothing to slow him down, much less stop him. 

“ I HATE Y O U ! ” Dahn screamed to the top of his lungs and his arms and legs desperately flailed about. The wind currents had become merciless once again, causing his body to spin midair enough times to make him incredibly dizzy in a short amount of time. With the world revolving around him, everything merged into a blob of colors and made it impossible to tell which side was up and down. The need to scream for help was unbearable, trapped inside a heart that felt so close to exploding into millions of pieces inside of his chest in a matter of seconds. However, no matter what he tried to say or whatever words he tried to articulate, all that came out were incomprehensible screams and yelps. I’m gonna die. I’m seriously gonna die.

Suddenly, a pair of hands wrapped around his forearms. Dahn immediately reciprocated the act, gripping onto the other pair of forearms so hard his nails dug into the skin. He wasn’t falling anymore.

He turned his head up to see Kat smiling down at him.

Before he could say anything, though, he was thrown once again into the air like a basketball without much effort, going up a few meters up and falling many more until Kat grabbed him by one of his limbs. While Dahn went up and down, screaming and begging it to stop as if he was being tortured, Kat laughed and did various acrobatics in the air beside him. After the third time, Dahn realized Kat was toying with him the same way orcas and house cats played with their prey before… eating them. Being eaten wasn’t his biggest worry at the moment, however; Kat failing to catch him or accidentally ripping one of his arms off was.

Thankfully, none of the three possibilities ever happened and eventually Kat decided to end the ‘game’, grabbing him by the waist like she had earlier. She panted and let out breathy laughs.

“What’s wrong?” she asked upon seeing his glassy eyes. “Did you think I was actually going to let you fall?” 

Dahn stared at her, completely and utterly dumbfounded. Then, he began to chuckle. It was unsure and soft, but it soon took form and became full-fledged laughter. Kat laughed as well, at least in the beginning, but stopped soon thereafter when she wasn’t sure about what they were laughing about anymore. Dahn, on the other hand, continued to laugh; tears rolled down his cheeks and his stomach hurt.

“Uh, friend? Everything alright?” Kat said, a worried smile on her lips. “You were laughing a second ago and now you’re crying… Why is that?”

Dahn sniffed and wiped a tear away with a fist. “Y-you’re sick…”

Kat didn’t say anything, yet he could hear and feel her smile slowly disappear along with any other emotion she might’ve shown a second ago.

“Please let me down,” he said in a wobbly voice, his tears’ trails still fresh on his face. 

“… Alright. Sorry.”

She didn’t say much afterwards. With gentle beats of her wings, Kat continued flying for a few more minutes until she swerved and dove down once again through the clouds. It was at this point Dahn noticed the illuminated city he expected to see was notably missing, instead replaced by numerous tree heads that formed a wide forest. There wasn’t any trace of it in the distance, either, only trees followed by even more trees. This felt… strange. Dahn would have never imagined there being such a grand forest next to his home near the heart of New York, no less. In any case, were they even still inside New York? The idea sounded ridiculous on paper, but when it came to Kat, Dahn had already learned logic didn’t always necessarily apply. For all he knew, they could be hundreds of miles away from anywhere remotely familiar or simply overflying a national park.

This feeling of uncertainty left a bad taste in his mouth, making him question why he had ever decided to consider listening to Kat’s reason, whatever they were.

They continued to get closer to the ground in the direction of an open patch of land covered only by grass and a small number of trees too skinny and frail compared to the ones around them. Dahn instinctively picked up his legs while Kat readied hers to land. They started doing a walking motion moments before touching down on the ground and, whereas he expected landing to be rather turbulent, the process was rather smooth. Kat’s shoes tapped on the air as if she were going down a set of stairs until they came into contact with grass and dirt, stepping on them with a certain caution. Dahn was let go of soon thereafter, much to his relief. He stumbled forward, his head hanging low while nausea stirred up her insides. Kat averted her gaze from him as Dahn recovered, silently tucking her wings away behind her back. She slipped the hair strands that fell across her face behind her ear-wings and deeply inhaled to give a nasal sigh. 

“ Ughh …” The groans of coming out of his mouth seeped of sickness to the point he felt even worse just by hearing himself. It took all of his will to keep his stomach’s insides in their place.

“Are you alright? Do you need me to heal you again?”

“No. Thank you, I’m fine.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Kat quickly clasped her hands behind her back and straightened her back, mustering the faintest smile. 

After a couple of minutes, Dahn finally managed to pull himself up, careful not to make any sudden movements that would upset his stomach. Kat, meanwhile, patiently waited, never seeming the least bit impatient like Dahn would have expected her to be. This, along with other things he had discovered about Kat thus far, confused him— and greatly at that. In the little time he had known her, she had always acted too… nice towards him. He just couldn’t understand why, and he continued to ponder about the plausible reasons in his head as he approached her.

Like back at the park, he was unable to look at her directly in the eyes. He waited and waited for Kat to say something, anything that would break the awkward silence and tension between them, but she didn’t. In fact, with just one peek at her, Dahn was instantly able to read the uncomfortable look on her face and felt a surge of empathy towards her. 

“How are you going to do it, then?” he asked in a small voice, clenching his fists in anticipation for her response.

Kat snapped out of her thoughts. Her now visible ear-wings twitched upwards, her eyes slightly widening. “Huh? Do what?”

He frowned. “Well, that .”

Kat’s head tipped to the side with brows furrowed together and clueless eyes. Dahn could feel his frown deepen, knowing he would have to remind Kat the reason she had brought him to the middle of the woods. However, he was soon relieved of this burden when Kat understood what he meant.

“Ah, yes! That! Sorry, I’m a little forgetful today,” Kat said with an apologetic smile. “It’s been a long day for me.”

Dahn remained poker-faced but was unable to keep a sigh of relief from escaping from his lips. 

“Well, it’s… somewhat complicated to explain,” she explained, her eyes trailing off. “But showing you a ‘reason’ won’t be a painless process.” Dahn’s head shot up and he unconsciously took a step backwards. “I’m telling you now so we don’t risk you flinching or reacting strongly; it could end in disaster. You see—,”

“How— How much will it hurt?” was the only thing that managed to come out of his quickly drying mouth.

“If it makes you feel better, I think you could compare it to having one of your limbs being suddenly ripped off.” His heart shot up to his throat for a moment before falling back to its original position in Dahn’s chest, a wave of uneasiness that came from the uncertainty of Kat’s words traversing across his body. It made every hair on his arms and back of his head stand like that of a startled cat’s back. “Though, I can’t really say,” she assured him with a chuckle, “it varies from person to person.”

Dahn’s mind failed to grasp what Kat did next. In the blink of an eye, she zipped towards him and closed the three feet gap that had separated them just a moment ago. She didn’t even bat her wings or, at the very least, Dahn had failed to see her doing so. Nevertheless, he was now standing face to face with her, their eyes focused on nothing but each other. It was then he noticed something strange with Kat’s eyes. Their hazel color began to gain more and more vigor to the point he could say with certainty there were glowing. They resembled the light she had created back at the park in how mesmerizing and easy it would be for him to get lost in their glow. One of Kat’s hands was firmly placed on his right shoulder.

“Now, hold still.”

The command alone was more than enough to petrify Dahn in place, even bringing his breathing to a full stop in the process.

Out of the corner of his eye, he managed to see Kat draw a spiral line midair and a thin line of warm light manifest, following her finger’s movements. The spiral slowly began to spin and continued to do so even after Kat stopped drawing the trial it followed, picking up speed. A series of shapes, runes and symbols manifested inside of the spiral, sparking the faintest notion of déjà-vu inside of him— almost as if somewhere, in the deepest corners of his mind, there lay a memory of seeing those symbols. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was roughly the same feeling he got when trying to dig up information during a test: It was there alright, but for some reason the memory was cloudy and foggy to the point it would require all of Dahn’s mental power to clearly remember.

Dahn let out a low whimper when Kat’s hand pushed the spiral towards his chest, pushing it over where his heart would be. 

At first, it felt warm. A second later, though, the pleasant sensation turned excruciatingly painful. Waves of hot shot up from his chest to other parts of his body, forcing him to bite his lip in response. He wanted to scream to the top of his lungs. He wanted to push Kat away so bad. He wanted the feeling of fire being pushed against his skin to stop so bad .

His body, however, wouldn’t respond to anything he would tell it to do. His fingers and knees’ articulations creaked from how static they were, he couldn’t even bring himself to blink and his voice refused to come out. 

There were one, two, three and four sharp pulls inside of his chest and Dahn felt something being plucked off each time. It was as though hairs were being plucked from his scalp.

Then, in a swift movement, Kat pulled her hand back, taking whatever she had removed from inside him with it. Simultaneously, the light spiral disappeared into thin air and the pain came to an end. Still, the ghostly sensation of fire continued to travel around his chest, arms and throat, now a fuzzy feeling of numbness that soon dissipated in the following seconds. Dahn desperately gasped for air and immediately started coughing from the dryness in his throat. His hand quickly reached to touch the area around his chest and found it to be in perfect condition: No tears in his shirt and no burned skin underneath. Relief filled him.

What had she pulled out, exactly? His eyes looked up fueled by the need to answer this question, but what he saw only brought forth even more questions.

In Kat’s hand floated four orbs of light no bigger than an inch and a half. Each glowed with different intensities, which was also reflected in their size: The bigger they were, the more they shined. 

“I do hope these are the ones,” Kat said under her breath as she analyzed the orbs with a hand clasped over her mouth. 

“What—” Dahn choked on his words and couched a couple more times, “w-what are those?”

“You’ll see.”

With a careful hand, she singled out the smallest orb from the rest; the one that seemed to be mere moments away from vanishing into thin air like dust. She twirled her fingers above it, drawing a perfect circumference. Next, using a loose pistol hand, a triangle was traced and subsequently spun like a spinning top to create a very intricate rendition of a star of David filled with the same runes as the spiral from before. With a stoic face, Kat pushed out her stretched palm in front of it. 

The orb came to life the moment she did this and began to shine with more and more intensity, simultaneously growing in size and engulfing Kat’s hand. Kat herself disappeared next followed by Dahn, barely able to hold out his hands to shield himself from the blinding light.  

When he opened his eyes, he noticed that the time of day had changed into the early afternoon and, most importantly, they weren’t in the forest anymore. 

Dahn could still hear birds gleefully chirping, though, and could feel sunlight coming in from behind, warming his back. He looked around, letting his eyes adjust to the light of the room they were in. Realization hit him in the most merciless way possible, causing his throat to swell up and his heart to drop. 

They were inside a living room almost as large as all of Dahn’s apartment, the other parts of the house the living room belonged to in full display due to a lack of walls. There was a kitchen at the far right next to the entrance door, stairs to the left and a crystal door that led to a garden beneath them. Around them were a plethora of sofas and chairs surrounding a coffee table in the middle, placed over a giant earth-colored carpet. Different plants and flowerpots decorated every counter, table and flat surface along with old-looking pottery and photo frames that triggered memories in Dahn’s mind like countless fireworks being set off one after the other.

All of them only gave him more reason to start to slightly choke up; Dahn wouldn’t let Kat see this, however. He bit his lip after swallowing with difficulty.

His eyes quickly darted towards Kat, who only offered a soft smile in response.

Before he was able to speak, the sound of the entrance door opening caused them both to redirect their attention to the group of people coming into the house. First came in a woman probably in her mid-60s. She was accompanied by a child no older than 10 years old with a bowl cut, struggling to carry a plastic bag with both of his hands. Dahn was overcome by a feeling he couldn’t describe.

That’s… me.

They were followed by two young ladies maybe half the age of the older woman. They chatted enthusiastically with each other as they also carried bags overflowing with produce and groceries. 

Dahn’s heart immediately crumbled into pieces and his gut fluttered in the worst way possible the moment he saw the face of the lady on the right.

A single word came out of his mouth.

“ Ina .”

‘Mom’.