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All I know is you held the door,
And you’ll be mine and I’ll be yours.
They all stand beneath the sky of the 143rd floor, quiet and mood-dampened. Bam continues to stare up, at the orange sky, at how it seems night won’t spread out against it. He used to think he had known a little bit more after getting out of that cave; about the mornings, the afternoons, and the evenings.
Now, Bam doesn’t know how he should then presume. How should he begin?
They have read about the test, now each holding a sky lantern. Even though it’s paper-thin, it feels heavier than any weapons they have wielded on the previous battlegrounds. Bam looks over. At blue hair fluttering in the gentle wind, almost ghostly. At the left arm that is braceleted. At the neck white and bare.
Bam touches his own bracelet once he catches Khun’s expression. This is something he shouldn’t be burdening Khun with. Those thin shoulders already have enough to bear.
Shibisu makes a noise of surprise; the team’s attention laps toward where Khun is standing. A single lantern descends from above with grace. It lands right where Bam prays it doesn’t even graze—the palm of Khun’s hand.
“Khun Aguero Agnis will die in the next 48 hours at the hands of the one he loves the most,” reads the sky lantern. Everyone looks at Bam. No one dares to take a glimpse at Khun.
It’s already starting. There’s no time. Bam’s heart is in his throat as if reminding him, There’s no time.
Khun just laughs, a sound so casual that Bam has never quite got used to hearing. It means Khun is still holding onto the habit of undermining his importance, seeing himself as something that can be taken away, and that Bam simply has been lucky. Lucky enough to not have him drift on by. Enough for Khun to stay.
How long can Bam be ‘enough’ for, anyway? Does he dare disturb the universe for decisions that Khun can reverse with a turn of his heels?
Khun lets go of the sky lantern. Quickly, he pops off the cap of his pen and writes something on his own lantern. It heads for the sky with a sort of sickening grace. No hesitation because there’s no time. None of them can afford it right now. No hesitation because-
“Sorry, Bam,” Khun says, his smile unflinching in the face of their teammates’ concern and terror. So gentle that it’s godawful. Bam’s heart tightens in his chest. He opens his mouth to say something but can’t. He tries to breathe but even that has become too difficult a task when everything is slipping from his fingers like sand.
Khun rarely apologizes because he deems apologies as empty and unworthy of trust, at least coming from someone like him. Not when he kills. Not when he closes his eyes, lies to, or hides from the ones he loves.
Khun doesn’t apologize because he has known too well, known it all without carving the evidence out from his heart to show anyone.
The sky lantern returns, this time in Bam’s hand. When the paper grazes his fingers, it weighs him down entirely. It burns and it’s as cold as ice. Feels like a sledgehammer against his bone, like a paper cut that makes him want to hiss under his breath. Bam doesn’t know how to feel. Adored. Betrayed. Almost nauseous. Everything around him goes mute. World-shattering.
In Khun’s neat handwriting, it reads, “The Twenty-fifth Bam is the one Khun Aguero Agnis loves the most until the day he dies.”
With a shaky exhale, Bam bursts into tears. Suffocates. Drowns. His heart is flooded because this kind of betrayal doesn’t kill love along with it. What’s worse, he doesn’t quite want to struggle.
But there’s a hand in his hair, gentle; always the utmost gentle. It hurts but he caves anyway. Bam looks up and even though his vision is blurred out by tears, he doesn’t doubt that Khun’s smile is nothing but apologetic. The smile doesn’t drag any wider, “There will be time, Bam.”
All I know since yesterday,
Is everything has changed.
[ Countdown: 43:25:39 ]
Khun stops showing up for lunches and dinners. Not that it’s anything new.
Shibisu has locked himself up in his room to do as much digging as he can about this floor. Bam knows all of his teammates wholeheartedly care about Khun because even Endorsi and Hatz have ditched their sky lanterns in a closet to join Shibisu, a little hopeless as the research is going nowhere. Rak has announced that he’s going to ‘hunt down that Lantern Turtle who cursed Blue Turtle along with other turtles in this team’ and ventured off on his own.
No one mentions the firefish, not even Khun who always relies on it as his solution to every first-world problem—Khun dying without Bam knowing, without Bam at his side each time. Bam earnestly doesn’t want to bet on the firefish this time because they know honest-to-god nothing about this floor, the Administrator hasn’t even bothered showing up.
The day passes right by meaninglessly and uselessly.
For once, Bam isn’t sharing a room with Khun. He only starts noticing, awoken in the middle of the night, that he can no longer dream. The comforting, vivid landscapes of his subconscious, the place where he often finds the Red and Blue Thryssa for respite, are absent. Empty. A void.
There’s no time, Bam panics through labored breaths. He grits his teeth, his chest tightened with the weight of the day’s events. His fingers twitch uncomfortably. The urge to break, to blow a hole through something, to hurt is a cold lick at his spine—such sickening sentiments and he still carries it since the days of FUG training.
“Enough,” Bam decides and stands to head to Khun’s room.
All I know is we said, “Hello”
So dust off your highest hopes.
[ Countdown: 39:58:45 ]
Morning comes and the sky is still a captured photo of an afternoon nearing sunset, except there’s no sun or moon. There are no stars, either but Bam has given up on those kinds of things a long time ago. It’s not even that, he has already found his moon and stars for his night sky. They are all he can see, all he’s allowed to see so he can’t let go, not ever. Bam takes a deep breath and knocks.
“Come in,” Khun says and Bam pushes right through the door. It seems Khun knew he would be coming and he’s sort of expecting an outburst.
White dress shirt and open collar. Khun tilts his head, calm, “You’re up early. Want me to help you with breakfast?”
Golden gaze sweeps over the room in one go. Khun hardly touches the kitchen except for brewing his much-needed cup of coffee. Bam balls his fists, having noticed the dark circles beneath the crescent shapes of blue eyes. The tired smile drags on and reaches those eyes.
Usually, after a long day or a hard-won battle, Khun would neglect his own distress, claiming his conscience isn’t bothered one bit to open his arms wide for Bam.
Body and soul tattered from the fight, Bam always seems to cave. He lets himself be selfish, curls up like a child, and falls into Khun’s embrace because he knows Khun will be there to catch him anyway. He knows Khun will be there to call out to him—
“Bam?”
Bam refuses the crackling need for affection, in denial of how touch-starved he is. He walks with slow strides toward Khun’s bed and slumps against his shoulder without a word. Still warm. Still here. Khun is still here but there’s no time.
“Bam, what’s wrong-”
Bam ignores the question and tugs him in by the waist, closer. Still not close enough. Not enough, he thinks while nuzzling his nose into Khun’s bare neck. Khun blurts out a small gasp and Bam relishes in how vulnerable the sound is. His free hand reaches for Khun’s left hand, the braceleted one. Fingers are interlocked and Bam can finally take a proper breath for the first time on this damned floor.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Bam mumbles, doing his best to sound coherent through the agony that keeps puncturing his lungs.
Khun lets Bam melt into him and pats the top of his soft brown locks. “You can. There will be time,” he says, his heart skipping a discreet beat when Bam’s lips brush against his collarbone.
“I want time with you. This life alone isn’t enough.” Maybe an eternity, Bam thinks he can make do with that.
Those words feel like a nail hammered into Khun’s chest. It can be a curse of its own; Khun almost laughs, oh the cruelty.
Bam shifts a little and before Khun can say anything at all, he’s pinned down against the soft mattress. With dark bangs tickling his forehead, Khun chuckles, lifting a hand to brush them away and revealing a set of familiar golden eyes.
“There will be time for you and time for me. There should be time for us, too,” Bam tells him quietly, his eyes bright in the dimly lit room. “I want us to be family.”
Something flutters strangely in Khun’s chest, his hand nearly retracting from surprise but Bam holds it still, leaning down to caress the empty ring finger. “You’re not something to be traded for just so I can pass a stupid test. I can tell you that over and over again until you accept it.” Until you accept me.
Warmth breaks out on Khun’s milky cheeks. With Bam on top of him, there’s quite literally nowhere to run and nothing to hide but stubbornness is something he will hold onto for the sake of his pride. He struggles to get back the grip of his own hands—just so he can hide his face—but Bam doesn’t budge.
“Khun, talk to me,” he says, almost a demand, or a threat when his lips are now hovering over Khun’s ear. Khun wishes he could forget that Bam is no longer the timid boy he met on the test floor or the Regular who doesn’t know how to keep important things close to his chest.
Bam is grinning ear-to-ear now, Khun can feel it against his flesh. “I know you haven’t been able to sleep and it’s against your will, Khun. You’re so calm in the face of death I’m sure if anything, that curse would have made you sleep better.”
Khun goes breathless when he feels Bam’s teeth tenderly graze the tip of his ear.
“Come on, you’re our genius light bearer.” Bam’s voice is somehow still cheery, his grip slowly loosening in the daze. “You must have thought about this floor a lot. You must have something.”
With every last shred of courage gathered, Khun has his arms wrapped around Bam’s neck. “Since when are you so good at threatening?”
“I learned it from the best,” Bam admits proudly and shrugs off his jacket. “Now, if you won’t tell me, I’ll just have to force it out of you.”
“No need,” Khun sighs, a wordless ‘I really cannot with you’, and places a hand on his shoulder. A firm tug. “I plan on informing everyone about it before Shibisu does something idiotic as second-in-command, don’t worry.”
Then, a glint comes into his eyes. Playful and tender, anticipating something, even. “So come here, take what you want,” he assures Bam that it’s okay to get close because Khun is no longer the Regular who used to steal and send away things that will never belong to him. Khun has found a jewel he really loves, anyway.
All I know is pouring rain,
And everything has changed.
[ Countdown: 36:43:12 ]
“You’re all aware that I’m not dead, right?”
No one responds to Khun’s lighthearted question. “This is a meeting, not a funeral for fuck’s sake,” he groans, eyes rolling to the sky.
Shibisu gathers everyone at the dining table except for Rak; he’s still out there, somewhere. “Can’t we just overwrite the curse by cursing the test taker that cursed you?” he suggests, there’s no energy left in his body to lighten the mood anymore.
“I don’t think so,” Khun shakes his head.
Endorsi huffs out a breath, exhaustion evident beneath her eyes and on her face, “Then what exactly are you thinking?” She doesn’t know what Bam has been doing to him behind closed doors for the past hours but the bastard is communicating, not against his will, to her surprise.
“How many of you here were able to sleep?”
Laure, Anak, and Bam raise their hand, exchanging confused looks but they don’t really look any better than the rest of the team. Now that Shibisu thinks about it, he did suggest Endorsi and Hatz a short nap in the middle of their research but they couldn’t even keep their eyes closed for five minutes. He brushed it off as a spike in adrenaline and cortisol before moving on.
Khun throws in another question, “How many of you guys were able to dream?”
No one raises their hand at that one. The air gets collectively sucked out of the room. Shibisu crosses his arms, trying to see where Khun wants to get his point across. He facepalms himself with a loud smack. “Ah! Oh, oh, I see!” He should have known something has been tipped out of the ordinary when someone like Laure has trouble sleeping.
“Say it, Isu,” Hatz remarks at his side. He’s been doing his damnedest to sit with a straight back—a worthy swordsman needs a good posture—but his sleep-deprived brain is slowly but surely failing him.
Khun raises his index finger. “Hold that thought.”
Everyone, except for Bam, goes face-down on the table simultaneously. He almost lets out a ‘wow’ at that because they have never been this in sync, at least not when it’s necessary to maintain their lives in combat.
“What now?” Anak protests.
“We don’t know what the Administrator might do if we just say it aloud,” Khun says cautiously, his tone dropping several degrees. “I don’t even know if there are hidden devices to spy on us in this place.”
Endorsi still doesn’t see his point. “Who’s spying on us? They’re all scrambling to break their own curse. There’s no fucking clue about the true nature of this floor.”
“There might be residents on this floor who are test takers who never passed the test. So they stayed here, ran a business, and conveniently that way they could spy on newcomers like us to gain some kind of clue.”
Bam finally gets it. He has learned to put two and two together after spending years trying to figure out how Khun’s brain functions.
Everyone stares at Khun in dead silence, reminded of why he’s the only light bearer on the team and how many times they have escaped the grasp of death thanks to his morbid thought processes.
“So, what are we supposed to do?” Hatz raises a suspicious brow.
Khun just pulls up his lighthouse and sends them all a decent amount of money, his smile dangerously relaxed. “Take a walk. Go buy yourselves something nice. Try out the locals’ food. At least go in pairs, will you? I don’t want to be a babysitter going on a scavenger hunt for lost children.”
The team, except for Bam and Shibisu, regrets their initial decision to give Khun a more-than-decent funeral.
“Oh, and if you’re cursed or plan on cursing someone,” Khun chips in cooly. “Make sure to go through with it.”
All I know is a newfound grace,
All my days, I’ll know your face.
[ Countdown: 12:46:27 ]
Bam stands with Khun on the balcony, thinking how he’s sick of this orange sky. But if there’s Khun at his side, shoulders relaxed and mouth curving up, like this, Bam can’t think of anything else that he wishes for. Bam might have wished for a sky that doesn’t care for him but now he knows he’s already got the moon and the stars in his embrace.
Suddenly, Khun offers him a hand. “Do you trust me?”
“Always,” Bam says easily. His shinsu wings spread open to trail after Khun up to the sky. Higher and higher and higher. It’s been a while since Bam has gone this high without having to think about fighting someone. Something ripples through him, familiar—the first time he had seen the sky and how Khun earnestly told him it was all fake.
It doesn’t matter right now. Not anymore.
Once they’ve gone high enough, Khun stops, his feet steady upon his lighthouse. He points and Bam’s gaze follows the direction. Up. Higher and even higher—that’s what everyone who climbs the tower has in common, growing so dizzy from the height and driven into madness that you stop seeing what’s truly ahead of you. Sometimes, you stop climbing without realizing it.
The sky on the 143rd floor is simply thousands and thousands of sky lanterns spreading across the horizon. People unconsciously stop questioning what’s above them, so obsessed with cursing and being cursed. They are the ones who snap their own shackles locked.
“Let’s blast this place wide open, shall we?”
As Bam looks over, Khun has already summoned the firefish. It glows orange before shifting to blue, bright and dazzling. There’s a long scythe in his hand now, bathed in azure flames as proof that it’s something he has nurtured on his own strength—not the red flames of the Yeons, or the ice spears of the Khuns. Bam catches his reflection on the shiny blade and smiles at Khun.
The third fragment of the Thorn gets ignited. “Whenever you’re ready,” he nods.
Bam slashes right through the sky brimming with curses and Khun sets it ablaze.
All I know since yesterday,
Is everything has changed.
[ Countdown: 11:59:48 ]
On one quiet evening, the sky collapses on the 143rd floor. From the heart of each broken lantern, pure white feathers begin to emerge, floating down gently, slowly, like a delicate snowfall, a stark contrast to the deep, night sky. It’s an inky blanket that seems to stretch and reach for the dawn.
For the first time in centuries, curses have parted ways for the stars. Their pinpricks of light are gradually overwhelmed by the big, round moon. Bam stares in awe for one moment; maybe those are fake as well but no one should be allowed to take away the right to watch the stars or reach for the skies from anyone.
“Insolent brats,” a voice rumbles amidst the clouds. “Who dares disturb my slumber?”
Bam holds onto Khun’s hand tightly. Khun gives him a small smile, grateful, before turning to declare with eloquence, “Life cannot slumber forever, Administrator.”
Shinsu starts thrumming beneath his veins in alert, Bam realizes. So Khun has really triggered the Administrator enough for them to show up for the first time after centuries of running this floor comfortably in anonymity.
“To slumber is to be at peace. To live is to suffer. Have you not realized that after having climbed this high? I am offering you protection from the cruelty of reality.”
Khun drops his formal smile, a chilling tone seeping into his words, “You’re not protecting life. You’re caging all these people here.”
“Then, why does life slumber just to wake from our dreams?” The Administrator asks in a saddened whisper that might have softened Bam.
So Khun carries on with his testimony before the one who will hammer down the final judgment, “Because-”
Bam steels his resolve and cuts in, sternly, “Because there will be time.”
Khun stares at him, wide-eyed and mouth agape. His eyes dip into soft crescent shapes at the realization that Bam has grown to accept what is in his control and what isn’t.
“There will be time for indecisions and revisions. There will be time for you,” Bam stops mid-sentence, his eyes sweeping over at Khun’s face, and continues, “And time for me.”
A blade materializes in his hand, stained with the crimson shade of the Red Thryssa. “You made people curse and stay afraid of each other, of the world out there just to keep them hostage in this world of dreams,” he concludes. “No one has ever passed the test because no one dared to go through with their curse, isn’t that true?”
“Are you not afraid?”
“I am terrified of many things,” Bam admits, recalling the floor filled with bird cages and Khun Eduan’s floor with those glass flowers. His heart tightens for a frightened moment, a lopsided beat before letting it all go. “But that is no reason for me to close my eyes and run from reality.”
The first hint of light appears; a pale, almost hesitant glow that peeks over the distant edge. Each white feather catches the glimmer, sparkling with an otherworldly glow. “Forcing people to live a life they didn’t choose is cruel, not protection. You are using their fear as a means to the end you want.”
Gold and amber streaks cut through the soft pastels, heralding the imminent arrival of the sun. “The night’s reign will come to an end,” Bam asserts with a profound sense of reassurance because he’s got his own moon and stars on his side already.
“For it will return to lay life to rest,” Khun finishes the sentence for him—this is the final judgment that they have long decided for themselves.
Faint laughter echoes through the skyline, helpless. Resigned. “It seems I have slumbered for long enough,” the Administrator gives in. “Go on. Climb. Go even higher.”
Finally, the sun breaks fully into view, a radiant orb that dispels the last remnants of darkness. The sky grows blinding with color, a symphony of orange, pink, and gold that signals the start of a new day. Bam squints his eyes—he hardly understands what the sun is but now he’s certain that he’s so much closer to it than the majority of people in the tower.
Not that it matters, it’s all fake.
“Well then,” Khun begins and lets go—not for long, Bam knows that now. He spreads his arms wide open as if welcoming Bam in his embrace. There’s no weapon in his hands, his feet remaining steady upon his lighthouse.
Bam clutches his sword, still a little shaky without Khun’s hand in his. “I’m scared,” he confesses, honest until the very end.
White feathers brush at Khun’s fond smile when he says, “Face your fears, Ranker Jyu Viole Grace.”
“Promise me I’ll see you when I wake up?” Bam lets his shoulders rise and fall to brace himself.
“I’ll be with you everywhere and be your everything, if you’ll have me,” Khun breathes out a faint chuckle, his chest has never felt this light ever since he set foot in this city of curses and lanterns.
Bam smiles, too, because Khun is already his everything from the day they met on the floor of tests. He wants Khun to be with him everywhere as well but that might need time. And there will be time for both of them.
“I’ll see you soon, Bam.”