Chapter Text
Sometimes, he wonders if it was right then, recognizing Jinwoo, in the center, swallowed by eternal blue flames that could devour even the sky.
Some emotion he didn’t dare name gripped him; peering widely at the untouched man glowing in the center of the burning blue brightness, who stood there impassively, as if harmless visible air were caressing his shadowy skin. As the earth was consumed around him, scorched, there he was — alive.
Indestructible, except for his fragile clothes. Christopher couldn’t grasp a single fragmented thought.
But Christopher’s heart stopped when he realized his fire couldn’t burn him.
“Hey, you,” he called to Christopher, a voice that would haunt him until his dying day, muffled and eerily echoing through the thick smoke plumes rising from the ground in gushes of blazing hot wind, “why are you doing this?”
“If there was any good reason, wouldn’t I have said so?” he snarled so viciously, a trembling ache vibrating violently through his chest, something breaking as cracks spread through his damaged mindscape as if glass was about to shatter, “Who said I wanted to? Why are you in my nightmare if not to torment me?!”
“This isn’t a dream, but it could be.”
For some reason, deep down, he feels like the man means it differently, but riddles are the last thing he needs right now.
“Then what are we doing here?”
He collapses to his knees, every inch of him burning, the meadow on fire, the crumbling houses around him burned to their foundations, all the pretty flowers he saw when he came to this place to find peace, and it all went to hell hell hell —
“What—”
Jinwoo finds him in the flames, his body lit up, a human torch, yet he touches Christopher like an ordinary human, not a single finger singed when they should be burned down to the knuckle like cigars, his body igniting, but he’s okay. The first person who was ever okay since Christopher lost his mind.
“You’ll never have to be here again, Christopher.”
A cool hand touched his cheekbone, tears like molten lava traveling down the burning man’s face, the most humiliating moment of Christopher’s entire life, for not a single drop left a mark on Jinwoo’s pale, warm-toned skin, only rolling, without harm, over his prior scattered scars. Compassion laced his tone; his gaze was so soft with it, he couldn’t ever forgive him.
Christopher’s heart lurched in his throat, trapped in those eyes, and he laughed himself sick because his sanity had been hanging on by frayed threads for months now.
Jinwoo knocked him out just as he reached his hand out like a claw to go for his jugular.