Chapter Text
There isn't a reason as to why he’s biked all the way up to the top of the hill, to the peak of an unnamed mountain, to where the silent and unsuspecting place he grew up is nestled within the valley below. Mingyu wants to believe there isn’t a reason, but there is. He’s never been that great at acknowledging his problems.
Air sucks a vortex around his person as he lets his bike rest against a rusty guardrail. The noise it makes, the metal-on-metal, disturbs the sounds of the mountain mist and various birds amongst the trees. From up here, he can see his house. He can’t, really, but thinking he can calms him. Come to think of it, he does feel exceptionally calm. It’s in his nature, but right now and just minutes prior, he had been feeling anything but natural. He pulls his phone from his pocket; the time reads 16:32. He hadn’t realized it had gotten so late on the bike ride up. His parents might be cooking the evening meal right now, and they were also secure in his statement upon leaving, that he was only going out to help a friend study for an hour or two.
Mingyu couldn’t remember the last time he had talked to anyone else outside his family. Telling that lie had made his stomach churn. Surely, they’d realize he was being transparent. Surely, his own mother and father could see how disgustingly false he was being.
But they had kissed him on each cheek, as they were so used to doing, before patting him on the back and letting him go. He tried to clear his mind of that thought. He had scrubbed away at his cheeks with the sleeves of his sweatshirt as soon as he closed the door behind him.
Taking a deep breath, he swings his legs over the guardrail, careful not to rip his pants on the gnarled edges. When they found him, he wanted his mother to have pride in her darling son, taking special note not to ruin the clothes she had so graciously provided him. Hah. He was being bitter. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t his fault either, Mingyu thought, because it honestly wasn’t. Learning about the brain in biology class during school had given him enough of an answer. Some people were wired differently than others, and he just so happened to be one of the ones worse off. He’d tried so hard to feel happy. Some days were better than others; the ones when the sun rose and the birds chirped and there was hot food in the kitchen...those were nothing special. It was the days when he was alone that were best. The ones where he could ponder in solitude, whether it be in his room with the door shut or on his favorite park bench with a good book.
“What do you want to be when you graduate?”
“Where are you going to university?”
“When are you going to find yourself a nice girl to settle down with?”
His parents meant no harm. Mingyu felt bad for blaming them, because they were just that: parents. They’d ask all the usual questions that were probably outlined in some book titled “How to Raise a Compliant Child 101” and he simply couldn’t give straight answers. He’d spent the past however many years dodging them like bullets.
“I’m still deciding.”
“I’m looking for somewhere close, definitely.”
“When the time is right. Right now, I’m just not interested.”
For some strange reason, he touches his face and his cheeks are damp. Mingyu wants to think the tears are from the harsh wind from being so high in altitude, but the sad reality was that his thoughts were messing with him. The little voice in his head that so often kept him sane had now deserted him. He was completely alone here. In one part of him, he rejoiced, whooping and hollering inside the confines of his own self. In another part, he was screaming, banging on the walls to get someone’s attention. Mingyu shushed that part. He told it to go away, and it did, if only a little.
17:03. His parents could be distraught by now. They could be overboiling the water on the stove, or leaving the food unattended. Neither of them would think to come up here. They wouldn’t dare venture out past the street where their house was resting amidst twenty-some others that looked almost identical to it. The neighbors would not care. No one, obviously, would even bat an eye.
Before he had left, Mingyu had made sure to clean his room. There was no dust present, and all his picture frames and bookshelves were pristine, organized in the way he liked them. Not that it really mattered. He was self-conscious of the way his things were kept, and if his parents were to search through everything, he wanted them to be proud of how clean he was. The bed had been made, the pillows fluffed, and his note—concealed in a blue envelope addressed to ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’—resting atop his desk in plain view.
Meticulously, overweening, he had planned this down to the second. To the centimeter. To every fine detail and nook and cranny and niche. All of life leads to the moment you take your last breath, thought Mingyu, staring down into the ravine below. As cliche as it was, he wanted to make his last breath perfect and orderly.
It was all because of school. Funny, the one thing he did as a routine, as if being stuck in a rut was the best thing, it had turned on him and created some monster that even he was not familiar with. At school, if you had no friends, you were odd. Mingyu was odd. But he liked being alone, and he didn’t bother to introduce himself to anyone because it didn’t seem important. Being in his last year of high school meant that his grades should be getting the bulk of his attention. It had gone on for years, though, the oddness. Since he first started school, he didn’t play with the others but opted instead to sit in various recluse places, coloring at first, then reading books, then scrolling around on his phone, up until now, where all he did during lunch breaks was stare absentmindedly out the window.
All he knew was odd. And it wasn’t odd to him—it was all he was comfortable with.
High school students were like the packs of animals they do documentaries about on Animal Planet. Mingyu had made the connection shortly after this school year had started, when he’d overhear conversations about him—unwillingly, of course, but it drew him in—and how weird he was, how ‘that tall kid’ never talked to anyone except his teachers. And it was true. He wouldn’t deny it.
He didn’t deny it when they started calling him a queer, either.
Mingyu, being a docile person, wanted to go about his life peacefully. When something interrupted the peace, when earthquakes of insults shook him and daggers full of teenage poison got through his walls, he had nowhere to turn. The problem with his parents was that they were too set in seeing him as a normal boy his age should be: out having fun with friends, pulling mischief, kissing a different girl each week. It was normal. Painstakingly, horribly normal. And it wasn’t him.
Because maybe he was a queer. It wasn’t something he knew the definition of. But he did know that accidentally catching the eye of the star basketball player while everyone had been changing during gym class had been what had triggered it. So now, he was even more of an outcast. Normally, that label wouldn’t bother him, because it was true. People had left him alone, though. Not anymore. Apparently, once rumors flew like flocks of birds around a tiny school where everyone knew everyone, it was impossible to escape. It was impossible to admit their truth, even when someone shoved a box of condoms into his mailbox for his parents to find, the word ‘homo’ scratched with red pen all over the box’s surface. Mingyu remembered coming home from school to his parents crying in the living room, meeting his eyes with nothing but disappointment.
Is that what he was? No longer a son, no longer a human being, but a disappointment?
The box had been thrown away, and his parents didn’t bring it up at all after that day. Something, since then, had been off. Mingyu couldn’t decide on what it was, but he knew there was hostility shared across their dinner table. He felt it when they hugged him goodbye, how his own father began wrapping his arms not all the way around him, leaving space where his hands used to rub his back. Mingyu felt cast aside like the box that sat in the trash. The questions concerning when he was going to find a nice girl to date stopped coming, and he wished they hadn’t. He wished for things to be normal. He wished, most of all, that he had been born with the right path of wires in his brain instead of the rerouted ones that caused him to be such a fuck up.
But he had lived long enough as a fuck up, so he was used to it. Saddened by it, but adjusted.
His head bent forward, Mingyu stretched his neck to attempt to see the bottom of the pit he was faced with. The mist rises up from the ravine below; somewhere, his parents might be reading the note he left. Somewhere, his classmates might be telling jokes about him. Somewhere, Mingyu pushes himself to think it, he might have been happy. Somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn’t here. There really was nowhere else for him to be but here. There was, though, but Mingyu had not tapped into the rational section of his mind in a long, long time. Being rational was completely irrational. Being happy, though, that was a rational thing to want.
Why don’t you just kill yourself, fucking queer?
Mingyu doesn’t want to think about it as giving up. His stomach is oddly settled. His hands pat the wrinkles in his clothes as smooth as he can get them, and he looks down at his feet, placed precariously near the edge of the decline, making sure the laces of his dress shoes are tied. Double-knotted, as always. God forbid they come untied and fall off his feet. The wind is still for once, and his mouth moves to form words, but he quickly realizes nothing will come out but nervous vomit if he tries to open it to speak.
So, he takes a step. His legs have always been long, the factor of his unruly height, so it isn’t surprising that the step lands on solid air, hitting atmosphere for a millisecond before breaking through and dissolving. Mingyu wants to die with his eyes closed, so he shuts them, but it’s more out of force of the wind pushing him up than anything. It’s like gravity doesn’t want him to go, but it isn’t strong enough.
He doesn’t think about it. He thinks about the guitar that sits in the corner of his room, gathering cobwebs. He’d always wanted to learn to play it.
The ground hits him, or he hits it.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
The dust settles. His mind is clear, but it hadn't been moments before. Was death supposed to feel this calm? Was he in heaven, or someplace else? There wasn't much time to think, because Mingyu realized that he felt no ache in his bones despite the impact of landing...of falling. He had just jumped. He had actually done it. Instead of feeling proud of himself, or relieved, all he felt was the sense that something was off. His lungs expanded with air and he exhaled. Opening his eyes, the brightness flooded his vision. The sky still looked the same. The clouds still floated past. There was still mist fogging up his peripherals. There was a tenseness in his muscles, but then again, when wasn’t there? He experienced no sign of pain or brokenness, and it was weird.
It was weird, very weird, but the weirdest thing of all was the boy standing over him.
Mingyu lay perfectly still, only moving to blink. The boy blinked back. Before he could utter a word, Mingyu realized he was smiling. Why was he smiling? His eyes were crinkled up in silent laughter, and he took a deep breath before finally introducing himself.
Except, he didn’t.
“Wow, some fall, huh?”
Mingyu sits bolt upright, an imaginary board pressing his back into a perfectly terrified posture. The boy—he’s still smiling like a devil, and Mingyu is extremely disconcerted—moves so that he can sit across from him, legs folding like he’s relaxed. They’re sitting on the moist ground in the middle of two mountains and he looks like he does this every weekend. Mingyu is feeling anything but friendly. The air between them seems to buzz with electricity as if lightning prepares to strike. He gulps.
Mingyu opts not to respond to the other’s comment. “Who are you?” he asks, feeling himself shaking. His voice, he hears vaguely, resembles gravel. It’s quiet and rocky from lack of use, and he clears his throat in response. He wrings his hands together, feeling the cold chill his knuckles hold. He’s always had a habit of cracking them, but he can’t bring himself to do it at the moment.
The other boy raises a slanted eyebrow. “I’m an angel,” he answers as if it’s the most matter-of-fact thing, and Mingyu almost feels a snarky remark rising up in his throat like bile. “Does that answer your question?”
“No,” Mingyu asserts, shaking his head. Angels did not exist, he thinks, staring into the eyes of this...this thing across from him. He looked human enough. His voice sounded normal, quite deep, but otherwise ordinary. Mingyu squinted, trying to discern some form of ethereal fairy dust floating about, some Godlike aura, but nothing came. He wasn’t staring at anything special. It was just a guy. A normal guy. This ‘normal guy’ was smiling like he knew the secrets Mingyu didn’t even know about himself. It was quite offsetting.
“What’s your name?” Mingyu asks instead, trying to reason it out of him.
The supposed ‘angel’ just laughs. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
The boy leans closer and Mingyu finds himself drawn in. There’s something strange about the way he’s being looked at, but he puts it off, blaming it on how frazzled his mind is after facing certain death just moments before. He has eyes like stone, warm underneath, maybe, but their sharpness shone through any sense of temperature. Mingyu isn’t sure if he’s intrigued or scared. Perhaps a little of both.
“If I told you,” hums the boy, “your ears would bleed. Your heart would stop. You’d choke on its weight and its beauty. So obviously, it’s against protocol to even utter the first syllable.”
“What...what the hell? What are you?”
The boy shrugs his narrow shoulders. “I told you. An angel. A divine being, a child of God. A thing of beauty, intelligence, and a bridge between your world and all the others. Can’t you tell?" He lifts a hand and caresses his own cheek sarcastically as if to admire himself in a nonexistent mirror. This whole circumstance has Mingyu questioning whether or not he should’ve jumped in the first place. Certainly, if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be listening to some wack job claim he was God’s son, or whatever.
“A-angels,” Mingyu manages, his voice rising in pitch, “aren’t real. So you’re lying.”
The other boy, yet again, laughs, and Mingyu grows increasingly frustrated. Yes, he’s bewildered as all get out, but he must be dreaming. He’s moved past thinking he’s in heaven because his skin feels real and his breath is coming out in rapid bursts as if he’s just finished running a marathon. He’s not dead, by some miracle (or curse, he can’t really tell), so he’s either asleep or off his rocker.
“I am real,” the boy says, finally catching his breath. His eyes soften up. He seems to tilt his head in wonderment, the same gesture Mingyu upholds as he stares back. “Humans. You are all so naive. Believe me, Kim Mingyu, I am very real.”
“How do you know my name?” He doesn’t remember telling him. In fact, he’s certain he never did, because he was too preoccupied with the thought of death and how he still managed to fail at achieving something so simple. Mingyu watches some sort of humorous expression cross the boy’s face, leaving him with a knowing smirk and a slight crinkle in his nose. Mingyu curses himself for noticing so quickly.
“I know everything about you. From the moment you first took a breath in this world until the moment you take your last—which, by the way,” he interrupts his train of thought, gazing a little harsher at Mingyu, who suddenly feels the weight of guilt somewhere in his stomach, “will not be anytime soon, if I have anything to say about it.”
At this sentiment, he stands gracefully, extending an arm out to Mingyu. He hesitates before grabbing it, and he’s pulled up with ease.
“Wait,” Mingyu pauses to collect his thoughts. The other boy, who had taken a few steps in the other direction, looks over his shoulder. “So...that means you’re—”
“As cheesy as it is,” he interjects, flashing his teeth, “yes. I’m a guardian angel. Such a lame title, right? Why not something cooler? It’s so typical.”
Mingyu’s head is reeling. Typical. There was nothing typical about what he was hearing.
“Tell me,” the angel remarks, eyeing Mingyu suspiciously, “what were you doing up there?” He points to the sky, to the cliff where Mingyu had just willingly stepped off into nothingness. Oddly enough, Mingyu cannot formulate an answer, so he goes with the obvious.
“I jumped.”
“Uh-huh.” The angel ponders him. Mingyu doesn’t like this one bit. Who was this guy to bust into his life, well, the ending of his life, like he had? The whole ‘guardian angel’ gambit sunk in, and Mingyu thought about the fact that he couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. Then again, a fall from such a height would’ve certainly killed him on impact. What Mingyu had been hoping for hadn’t happened, and instead, it was as if he had just woken up on the floor of the ravine, uninjured, with some random boy peering down at him like a science project. Unless he was an excellent magician, the likelihood of this being some cruel joke were slim to none. Angels, Mingyu knew, were not real. But there was an angel standing right in front of him. Seeing was believing, but only because Mingyu couldn’t come up with any other theory as to how he hadn’t just killed himself. He decided in that instant to just go with it.
“Why did you jump, Mingyu?”
His voice is quiet; he’s just now realizing it, but it had only seemed loud and vibrant before when Mingyu had doubted his truthfulness. In a way, he seems to arch his shoulders inward, something Mingyu recognizes as a defense mechanism. He supposed angels could feel insecure, too. The words that slide from his mouth sound genuinely upset, which causes the pit of guilt already present in Mingyu’s stomach to grow in size and density. Once again, he fears that opening his mouth just invites him to throw up, but he swallows the feeling down.
“Life isn’t really...my thing. It’s not really working.”
“Well,” the angel mused, rubbing his temples, all whilst keeping eyes locked to Mingyu’s face. The intensity of his look almost burned, he thought. “I’m gonna make it work for you, okay? I’ll do whatever I have to.”
Mingyu finds himself nodding. After all, he was no angel. He didn’t know best. This guy, on the other hand, looked as though he knew exactly how to solve his problems. The only thing he had to overcome before getting to those problems was Mingyu himself. He was still wary of what stood in front of him.
“Prove it.”
“What?”
Mingyu repeats himself. “Prove to me you are what you say you are.”
The angel, now wiping the puzzled look from his face, does not laugh like Mingyu expects him to. Instead, he walks back up to him, a little too close for comfort, and stares straight into Mingyu’s eyes. Mingyu had been right: the angel’s eyes were warm underneath, upon closer inspection, but suddenly they started to change as if light were gradually being poured in, not unlike how the sun rises in the morning. Somewhere—Mingyu can’t tell if it’s close or not—the sound of singing drowns out every other noise, and he feels as if his feet are sinking...no, he’s floating. He can’t tell. All around him, he feels warmth like he’s never felt before; it’s like being set on fire without burning. The angel’s eyes have gone completely white, and Mingyu doesn’t want to stare but he cannot tear himself away. And then, as soon as it had started, it stops. Gasping for air, Mingyu stumbles back, and the angel remains calm, a completely unreadable expression on his face.
Mingyu rubs his eyes, and the angel shrugs his shoulders forward once more, assuming a position of uncertainty.
“Do you believe me now?” His voice is silk-like and soft, softer than Mingyu anticipates.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I do.”
Not wanting to carry on the topic of angels and weird reality bending or whatever the heck he had just experienced, Mingyu reaches for his cell phone. Throughout all of this, he’s forgotten which pocket he put it in before jumping, and he grows frantic, patting down his coat, before recalling it was in his pants pocket. The weight makes itself known as soon as he thinks of it. The angel kicks at the dusty ground below his feet, and he paces around aimlessly as if unsure of what to say.
Unfortunately, when Mingyu pulls his phone out, he finds the screen shattered. The angel, biting his lip to hold back a smile, shakes his head, reaching for it. Mingyu lets him take it. He turns it over between precise fingers, swiping the screen, pressing buttons, before realizing it won’t work. “Sorry I couldn’t save the phone, too. You landed gently, but apparently not gently enough.”
Mingyu sighs. He figures he’ll replace it later.
“What do I call you? If you can't tell me your actual name, y’know.”
The angel lets his smile take over his face. Mingyu forces his eyes away, then back up. Holding the shattered phone in one hand, the angel looks at his reflection in the cracked screen, taking his other hand to run it through his hair.
“Let me think.” Mingyu watches as the other boy pulls a face that looks like he’s scanning a book, reading words that he can’t see. His eyes go back to pondering his reflection, and a sudden smile appears, marking some revelation that Mingyu supposes he’s about to elaborate on.
“A few lives ago, I was...I was Jeon Wonwoo. This is him. Well, me now.”
“Jeon Wonwoo?” The name falls off of Mingyu’s tongue. It’s normal. Ordinary. Fitting, and maybe familiar, and he looks over the angel’s—Jeon Wonwoo’s—face, trying to decipher what he’s thinking. He says nothing, but Mingyu senses the name might take time to get used to.
“Jeon Wonwoo. A few hundred years ago, a thousand maybe, this is who he was.” The angel gestures to his body using both hands. Mingyu looks him up and down. He’s only a little bit shorter than him, which was expected (considering he was a freak in terms of height anyway). The clothes he wears are completely normal, albeit a tad bit baggy. Everything is so normal about him and Mingyu tries to stuff the juxtaposition of it all deep down in his brain. This was an angel, but he looked no different than a classmate. The youth still dripped off his features—his pointed nose, the curve of his jaw, and the bushiness of his eyebrows underneath the black fringe of hair. “When angels present themselves, they must inhabit some human body, and I guess this was one they had available.”
Mingyu snorted. “Is there, like, a body shop or like, a catalog, for you guys?”
Wonwoo—Mingyu makes a conscious effort to humanize him—just blinks. “Of course.”
“You’re serious? That’s—”
In a split second, the facade is gone and Wonwoo smiles again, letting him in on the joke. Mingyu has to admit it’s beautiful. Whether or not it’s because he’s an angel, he doesn't know, but whoever Jeon Wonwoo was must feel lucky now to know that his body was literally divine. The angel’s laughter is loud and it echoes around the steep walls of the ravine, and sometime soon after, Mingyu finds himself laughing as well. It’s hysterical. They both calm down when Wonwoo holds out a hand for Mingyu to shake. He takes it into his own, warm and firm and easy, and he doesn’t break the eye contact with the angel who still won’t wipe the smirk from his holy face.
“Let’s start over, okay? Nice to meet you,” he says, and Mingyu smiles, more relaxed than he had been for the past hour or so. “My name is Jeon Wonwoo. It isn’t really, but it’s all your human tongue can speak.”
“Kim Mingyu,” the other boy spits out. Wonwoo hasn’t let go of his hand, despite the handshake being long over and done with. For some reason, the pressure is welcome. “But I suppose you already know that.”
Wonwoo nods, dropping his grip. Mingyu draws his hand back, and since he feels so empty, he manages to hold his other hand in a feeble attempt to replace the angel’s.
“So, this is your job, then,” says Mingyu. Wonwoo cocks his head, looking around. “Well, you implied it’s always been your job. But why am I just now seeing you, if you’ve always been here?”
“I’ll explain,” Wonwoo says after a minute. He gestures for Mingyu to follow him, and he starts the trek out of the ravine. “But we’ve gotta get you home first. Let’s go.” Wonwoo doesn’t seem to be taking no for an answer, and Mingyu hasn’t thought about the itch in his brain that pushed him up here since Wonwoo first showed up, hovering over him. It’s a welcome distraction.
Because Mingyu will admit, he’s never been that great at acknowledging his problems.
Wonwoo, though, had made it quite clear that he was going to learn how.