B2ST: Uses for Feathers (2/2)
Also, just a quick note, I've got a few more fics I'll be spamming this community within the next few weeks. Arashi, Sherlock, possibly 2PM, too! aw yeah u kno u liek it (I hope)
Title: Uses for Feathers
3) To perform spells.
---
Dongwoon had never thought of his wings as a gift. He couldn’t, for scores of reasons, think something like that, and not go insane with anger every time another news bulletin reported on another round-up of casters, celebrating the event as if the CUBE agents had captured deadly terrorists rather than lost children. In the kind of society he lived in, in which spell-casters were something (not even someones) to be reviled, Dongwoon wasn’t afforded the mindset needed to look at his wings and think of them as beautiful.
But he wasn’t sickened by them, either.
The difference between Dongwoon and the rest of the world was that Dongwoon had never been without his wings. Even a person with a hideous growth defect (which, arguably, was what Dongwoon had), if encountered with the same reflection in the mirror day after month after year, will eventually get used to the deformity. The shame and hate might or might not abate over time, but acceptance of the malformation would be unpreventable. Dongwoon did hate his wings, and he was ashamed of them, but they would not stop growing, and as he grew too, they became as natural, as him, as his nose or eyes or his right hand. Not something to dismiss, obviously, but not anything worth examining with interest anymore. Checking his clothes for stray feathers before going outside became as habitual as checking that his hair was combed neatly and his eyebrows were groomed.
Which was why he was shocked when, one day, while flapping his towel free of lingering feathers, one accidentally flew into a scented candle on his desk and the resulting explosion blew a hole in Dongwoon’s wall.
There had been trouble, of course. Dongwoon’s parents had to lie, tell the repairmen that Dongwoon was playing with fireworks he’d kept from New Year celebrations -- but even then, the lack of gunpowder residue around the room was doubtlessly blatant. Bribes and blackmail were also needed to stem the suspicion.
Spell-casting was a crime punishable by death. The country had a no tolerance policy about it. Offenders didn’t get any strikes. Many didn’t even get a trial. CUBE agency worked under the strict guidelines of better safe than sorry, and leaving casters alive made them very sorry indeed.
It was only after the incident with the wall that Dongwoon, twelve years old, finally understood the importance and depth of secrecy: not just for his own sake, but for his family’s. His mother’s teary eyes as she yelled at him for being so careless and then swept him up in a massive hug afterwards, his father’s wan, disappointed face as he ran a brush through the edges of Dongwoon’s wings to trim for any more loose feathers, before silently collecting them in a box to be taken to the university’s biological disposal room, just as he’d always done, but this time wordlessly.
He’d complained desperately to his sister at his parents’ continued silent treatment, saying that he was sorry already, that he’d learned his lesson.
His sister had punched him and told him that sorry doesn’t bring people back from the dead.
Never reveal your wings. Never reveal your wings.
---
It’s been a long day. Dongwoon’s wrecked. He’s still got questions -- novels of them -- but he can barely keep a straight though in his head from the fatigue. When Gikwang silently reaches around him holding up Dongwoon’s wing braces, Dongwoon doesn’t even think to protest; it’s only when the other boy’s hands smooth down one stretch of his wings that Dongwoon bodily twitches away out of instinct.
“Sorry, sorry,” Gikwang says hurriedly, eyes huge. “Didn’t mean to. I just -- can you fold them back up? We can’t leave here with your wings out.”
“We’re not leaving until we find every last one of Dongwoon’s feathers,” Doojoon corrects. He’s already pacing the room, eyes low and darting around the mess scattered around the floor. “It’s bad enough that those women got a handful; imagine if someone else found some more.”
As the others search, Dongwoon forces his wings to close, movements jerky. When he gets them flat enough, Gikwang says soothingly, “That’s good, Dongwoonie, I’m going to tie them down now, okay?” Dongwoon nearly scoffs; he wants to say that he’s not a child and doesn’t need to be treated like a doll, but he knows Gikwang is trying to help. It’s just jarring, to have someone else touch his wings. He lifts his arms accordingly as Gikwang ties the straps against Dongwoon’s torso, the worn leather cool and familiar against his skin. Once his wings are strapped, Dongwoon breathes an internal sigh of relief. There should be no more accidents now, although his shirt is kind of ruined. How is he going to explain that to his father? In fact, how is going to explain any of tonight?
“Do you think they were CUBE agents?” Yoseob asks, rifling through the mess of blankets on the bed.
“Why would CUBE agents want Dongwoonie’s feathers and not kill him?” Gikwang says.
“You idiot,” snaps Hyunseung. “Dongwoon’s feathers are pure magical energy. You could do anything with them, with the right spell.”
“Like what?” Dongwoon demands.
“Like make a curse to infect a caster,” Junhyung says grimly. He tsks. “They shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with a single feather. We’ve got to be on our guard non-stop, now.”
“No biggie,” Yoseob says with a grin. “We’re good for it. Ah, I found one!” he cries, pulling a tiny, white feather out from a pile of throw pillows.
“Me too, me too,” says Hyunseung, unearthing another from the blankets under the pillows.
They end up finding five feathers; Doojoon makes everyone do two sweeps of the entire room, just to be certain.
“What should we do with them?” Gikwang asks. “Do you want them back, Dongwoon?”
Dongwoon feels vaguely uncomfortable just looking at them in other people’s hands. “Uh, no thanks. Can’t glue them back or anything, can I? You guys get rid of them however is safest, I guess.”
“It could be a good idea to keep them. One each,” Doojoon suggests, twirling one in his fingers. “You never know when we might need one.”
“I don’t know any spells involving feathers,” Junhyung gripes. “It’s so old school.”
“Then learn some!”
“Hey, I think I’ll attach mine onto a necklace or something,” Hyunseung says eagerly.
“You don’t mind, Dongwoon? If we keep them?” Yoseob asks, gingerly holding his feather in a cupped palm. He strokes one finger along its hair-then bristles, ruffling the barbs ever so slightly.
“Why would I?” Dongwoon shrugs.
“Feathers symbolize a lot,” Junhyung explains, holding his feather up to the light. “You giving us your feathers, for instance. That shows trust. It’s something that we have to take seriously, with our traditions.”
“But I do trust you guys,” Dongwoon says bluntly. And then, “Will you teach me those traditions?”
Junhyung blinks at him, the corners of his lips twitching upwards. “Another day, for sure. But let’s get you home safely first.”
Dongwoon hadn’t noticed it before, but there’s a faint shimmering spread across the walls of the room, as if they’d been papered by a very thin layer of plastic wrap. At first he thinks he’s just seeing things, maybe there are some lingering effects of his injury he doesn’t know about or something, because the more he squints at the door to the room, the more blurry it gets.
Gikwang taps his arm. “It’s a shield,” he says. “We wanted to keep people from barging in while Junhyung was waking you up. It’s deflecting attention from us after the huge ruckus those girls made.”
“Can we get out?”
“Sure we can,” Gikwang nods, and strides up to the door. He places both his hands on the wooden panelling, fingers spread like a fan, and chants something quickly under his breath. The walls ripple, a flash of light pulsing outwards from Gikwang’s hands, and then abruptly, melt back to their regular dark red colouring. “Here we go.”
Magic? But -- “Wait,” Dongwoon rushes to say, “we just -- how do we explain the mess?”
“What mess?” Hyunseung drawls.
Dongwoon turns around. The room is perfectly clean and in order, every last pillow back on the bed and each broken glass returned to its proper form. Yoseob reaches over the bed to bat around some of the pillows and muss up the blankets.
“We can’t leave it too clean,” he says. “That’d be suspicious, I think.”
“What the hell,” says Dongwoon.
Yoseob winks at him. “I mean, you can’t think that we just sit around twiddling our fingers around, when we know how to use spells?”
“If you get caught--” starts Dongwoon.
“Gikwang’s barriers are great,” Doojoon interjects, shrugging. “Besides. We’ve done our research on CUBE; I think we could handle anything they throw at us. Well, hopefully. Let’s not go around asking for trouble.” He claps a sturdy hand on Dongwoon’s shoulder; Dongwoon surprises himself by not flinching. Not that he usually flinches around Doojoon, but it’s been a traumatic night. He tries to match Doojoon’s smile.
“Doing okay?” Doojoon asks.
Dongwoon doesn’t know. Things seem sharper, somehow, as if the knowledge he’s been given tonight has given it a new vibrancy, or shifted his body’s perspective on how to look at them. The world is suddenly a much larger place than Dongwoon remembers waking up in, but his feet on the ground feel steady and his wings feel secured. His friends are still here, always have been.
“It’ll be fine, Dongwoonie,” Doojoon reassures him. “No matter what, we’ll protect you.”
“I’m not a damsel in distress, hyung,” Dongwoon whines.
“But you’re our youngest,” Doojoon grins, leading him out the door. “So we’ve got to take care of you.”
Dongwoon’s about to protest those words, despite the warm feeling he gets in his stomach, but the second his foot steps out of the doorway to the private room, he feels something lurch horribly within him.
He whips around to stare at Doojoon. “Hyung,” he croaks.
“Dongwoon?” Doojoon grabs onto his wrist. “What’s going on?”
“Shit, shit,” Junhyung pushes forward to grab Dongwoon’s other wrist. “Look at his aura, it’s faltering. I’ve seen this once before: he’s getting summoned. Dongwoon, look at me, okay? Look at me.”
Dongwoon’s entire body is trembling. He can’t move. It’s as if his insides are slowly being disintegrated inside his body, bit by bit -- there’s no pain, but there’s a tidal wave of emptiness flooding through his core, leaving him cold and frozen. He takes a deep breath, keeping his eyes on Junhyung’s face, until he feels his heart jerk inside his ribcage and he has to squeeze closed his eyelids.
“What’s--” he manages to grit out.
He can hear Yoseob’s voice behind him, humming something high and melodic, one of his large hands pressing in the centre of Dongwoon’s back.
“How did they do this?” Doojoon demands, grip tightening fiercely on Dongwoon’s arms.
Junhyung shakes his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know. His feathers -- there must be some kind of link between him and his feathers, and if they use some kind of transportation or reunion spell -- Yoseob, skip to the next verse, we need a stronger anchoring.”
Yoseob’s stream of words quickly shifts into something harsh with consonants. Dongwoon clenches his jaw and tries to keep his mind from being ripped in half, like his body seems to be.
“Shit, it’s not enough,” Junhyung whispers. “It’s too late; fuck, how did those bitches act so quickly?” He looks to Doojoon, no attempt to keep the panic off his face. “Fuck, what do we do? We can’t stop it!”
Doojoon grabs Dongwoon’s face in his hands. A rapid slew of words spill out of him, his voice fiercely demanding, leaving no room for questioning. “Dongwoon, listen to me. You’re being taken somewhere, and once you get there, people are going to try to hurt you. They will try, but you can’t give in, okay? Whatever they do, don’t let them take your feathers. Don’t let them break you; your magic will be less powerful without your trust infused in it. Do your best. It won’t be for very long, because we’re going to find you, and we’re going to get you out. I promise. I promise we’ll come for you and get you back. Do you believe me?”
It takes all of Dongwoon’s strength to nod yes. When he blinks, Doojoon’s image seems to be getting further and further away from him. He feels surrounded by white; there is air funnelling into his ears, loud, icy, biting, carrying out everything within him.
Doojoon’s voice seems very far away. He’s saying, “We’ll get you out, Dongwoonie, just hold on. We’ll find you.”
Dongwoon tries to repeat himself, tell Doojoon that he believes him, that he won’t give in, he won’t let them down, but he takes one more breath and feels himself getting sucked out of the room -- gone, like an extinguished flame.
---
4) To be harvested.
---
With a pair of wings on his back, Dongwoon wasn’t allowed to take the simple things for granted. Security, comfort, trust in others -- these were all states that he experienced rarely, which made them precious. Regular, non-magical people were able to walk into a room and smile at strangers, shake their hands with confidence; Dongwoon could do this too, but he could never feel safe while doing it. His life was a never-ending walk over hot coals -- one step too far and that’s it. Done. Game over.
Nightmares were a given.
Dongwoon had quite a repertoire:
Imprisonment.
Decapitation.
Watching his parents die, before he was imprisoned and then decapitated.
Losing his friends -- his real friends, who Dongwoon had grown up with, who Dongwoon would trust with his life, because he’d read them wrong all along and they couldn’t get on with him if he was a freak.
Being tethered down, forced to lie flat on cold, hard pavement, while greasy, greedy fingers yanked mercilessly at his feathers, tearing them out in great fistfuls, pulling screams from his throat until he was practically braying with hysterics.
Never seeing the sun again, slowly dying from the inside out.
Each day Dongwoon spent normally at home was a relief, an accomplishment. Each time Dongwoon laughed with his friends hard enough to forget that he wasn’t just some normal teenager was a date to be treasured. A memory to keep.
When Doojoon, their nicknamed leader, had graduated high school, he’d promised all five of them that they’d stayed friends forever. The sentiment was cheesy, but the moment was sincere and had left Dongwoon reeling. He had taught himself not to depend on anything in the world, no matter how permanent it seemed, because all it took was one accident and everything could be upheaved by the root -- but he remembered thinking at that time that it was, maybe, okay to depend on those five guys.
---
“Is she dead?” Dongwoon asks.
Yoseob shoots him a look before stuffing his gun back into its holster. “What would make you feel better?”
“Not knowing people like her existed,” says Dongwoon truthfully.
Junhyung reaches over to hold his fingers to the woman’s neck. After a moment, he pulls away. “Dead,” he confirms.
Dongwoon doesn’t feel any sense of vindication, no split-second of good, I’m glad. He doesn’t feel any guilt, either. Instead, he feels hollowed out, as if he’s had his insides scooped out with a rusty spoon and the rest of his shell body aches with lack of -- substance. Looking at the body on the ground is difficult. Dongwoon shuts his eyes.
“She would have killed you once she was done with you,” Doojoon tells him. “That’s how these guys work.”
Dongwoon grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to think about this, about the last few days (weeks?). He wants to go home, sleep, and forget everything. “Can I come down now?” he says in a voice much louder than he’d expected.
Almost immediately there are hands pulling at his bindings, edging mania with their urgency.
Dongwoon turns his head to look at Gikwang’s tightly drawn face, then to his other side, where Hyunseung’s eyes are achingly dark and his lips are pinched.
“Really -- what Leader said before. We’re sorry we let them take you,” Gikwang whispers.
“I’m sorry I got taken,” says Dongwoon.
“You idiot, don’t say that like it’s your fault,” Hyunseung snaps, but softly.
“They’re my wings. How is it not my fault?” Dongwoon says wearily.
“We’re your hyungs. How is it not ours?” asks Doojoon, holding out his arms so Dongwoon can tumble into them as soon as the last of his torso bindings are unbuckled and ripped off his body. He catches Dongwoon with barely a step backwards to balance for Dongwoon’s weight, then sets his hands right below where Dongwoon’s wings sprout. He massages the skin there, his movements so faint that they’re almost indiscernible; still, Dongwoon can’t help his full-body shiver.
“I’ve got you, Dongwoonie,” Doojoon says, breath ruffling the hair at Dongwoon’s ear. “You’re safe. We’ve got you.”
Dongwoon clenches his eyes closed again. There’ll be time to cry later.
“Last ones,” Hyunseung calls, and Dongwoon feels the remaining cuffs tying down his ankles come loose with a slight slither of fabric and a clink of metal. He pitches forward, the blood rushing through his legs as he tries to catch himself.
“Slow, Dongwoon, it’s okay.”
Dongwoon bites back a hysterical laugh. What part of his at all is okay? He lowers his feet on the cold tiled floor of the room and gingerly lowers his weight to rest on his right foot -- and nearly sinks his teeth into his tongue as he holds down a scream.
---
“Hello, young one,” says a man, when Dongwoon regains consciousness. He is smiling at Dongwoon, but his smile is far from kind.
From there on, things only get worse.
“Where--?” Dongwoon mutters.
“A simple lab,” says the man amiably. “We’ve made it custom, just for you, boy.”
Dongwoon looks around fretfully: he’s in a large room with white walls and white tables and white equipment of unknown purpose. The entire floor, on the other hand, is pitch black and covered in chalk etchings: circles, triangles, words, symbols. Dongwoon knows he’s not a genius, but he’s got good intuition, and these kinds of runes look anything but friendly.
There’s the faint smell of ozone in the air -- something recently had been burning.
There are people, a few of them. People in lab coats and dark lab glasses, people who wear grey-blue gloves. There are also people in uniforms of the exact same shade of grey-blue, police issue, similar to the ones Dongwoon has seen on patrollers, cruising around at night for the homeless casters, sniffing around like bloodthirsty dog-catchers. These are CUBE employees, then. Or if not the main branch, a not-too-distant faction.
His worst nightmares, come to fruition.
In short order, Dongwoon is hauled up right and laid down on the hard, cool plastic of one of the man-length tables. His wrists and ankles and waist are all secured down by thick, black leather straps; Dongwoon struggles as much as he can, but he’s still weak from the -- whatever it was that brought him here. His head is spinning, and his stomach isn’t faring any better, but both feelings pale in comparison to the liquid fear that is infusing his entire body. Dongwoon could die here. Eighteen years old, right out of high school. They’ll do a DNA test and identify him and go after his family too.
“Let me go!” he shouts, pulling against his constraints. “Where am I? What do you want from me?”
“Come now,” a male voice says from behind him. “Don’t waste your energy on things you know will do you no good.”
The table he’s lying on begins to rise like a dentist’s chair, tilting him into a vertical position. A panel halfway down its length pops off, leaving sterile air to brush up against Dongwoon’s ruined shirt like a warning.
“No,” Dongwoon cries, trashing harder. “No! Let go of me! Let me--” he chokes mid-word when a gloved hand strokes down his spine, right between his closed wings. For a split second, Dongwoon’s stomach lurches with dread and he thinks he’s going to be horribly, violently sick, and then he feels the sharp pinch of a needle, and then, blackness.
When he cracks open his eyes again, his head is pounding, his entire body is sore, and there’s a short, black-haired woman peering at him, expression imperceptible behind her thick goggles.
“Awake?” she chirps. “I’ve been assigned as your doctor here, Son Dongwoon. You’re a very interesting specimen, I must say. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“A... doctor?” Dongwoon slurs. He aches all over. His tongue feels swollen in his mouth. How much time has passed? Is he still in the same room? What on earth is happening?
“I’m to make sure you don’t die, in these upcoming days.”
Dongwoon doesn’t know what to say to that.
“How are your wings?” she asks politely, although her tone is detached and clinical. “Do you have any feeling in them at all?”
The answer is no, because Dongwoon hadn’t even been aware that they’d been open, this entire time. His wings are open, the longest feathers trailing on the chalked-marked ground, and Dongwoon can’t feel a thing. His entire back is numb. Oh God. Dongwoon wills his back muscles to clench, tries to lift up his wings, tries to ruffle them, anything. They don’t as much as jerk. It’s as if someone had amputated them from Dongwoon’s control completely. Oh God.
“Good,” the doctor says, reading his stricken expression correctly. She walks over to a small table beside Dongwoon; on it is balanced a tin tray, arranged with shiny metal tools. She picks up a pair of long, long tweezers and smiles at them. “Then we can begin.”
---
A moment of suspended time: the doctor stares at the five intruders, and the five intruders stare back. Dongwoon forgets to breathe.
The moment breaks -- all at once, spells are being hurtled through the air, sending the room into a cacophony of lights and crackling explosions. Dongwoon turns his head away, unable to keep from flinching as the floor shudders and heaves. If he hadn’t been strapped down, Dongwoon would be on his knees now, trying to keep balance among the convulsions of a rocking battlefield.
A particularly loud shout from Doojoon catches Dongwoon’s attention, and he automatically whips his head back to the scene. What if one of them got hurt while Dongwoon was busy being scared shitless -- unacceptable, unacceptable -- but Doojoon’s fine. He’s roaring at the woman, except the air being expelled from his mouth is rippling the scenery between them. The doctor holds up her hands as if bracing against a wall, and her hair and coat are blown back from an invisible wind.
The door bursts open again, and a mob of uniforms come rushing in, guns at the ready.
From there, it’s chaos. Dongwoon watches in horror as the others throw themselves head first into the developing fight, power fizzling from their fingertips. He strains against his bindings for the millionth time, but they don’t give, of course they don’t. If he’d only been untied a little earlier--
His wings quiver in agitation and Dongwoon forces them still.
A particularly loud yell from Yoseob: “He’s not your prisoner!” he shouts at the female doctor, and lifts a gun in his hand. There’s a bang, and though Dongwoon doesn’t see a bullet or any smoke, the doctor jerks with the force of the impact and pitches to the ground, landing flat on her back. A thin trail of blood gurgles from her open mouth, and her eyes, always so cold and impassive behind her thick glasses, go dull and blank.
The noise settles. There are other bodies lying on the ground, now. Amidst them, Dongwoon’s friends stand, panting, but alive.
---
He doesn’t know how many days he spends there, caught in that laboratory like a fly in a spider’s web. He knows that he loses feathers by the hour, and although the anaesthetic they’d administered to him keeps him from feeling the pain of the plucking, internally, he still feels the loss of each one as keenly as a missing limb. They’re part of him, his most unique part, and they’re being harvested for -- for who knows what.
He is scared that his dad is out there, worried about him.
He is scared that his family has been captured and killed for raising him.
He is scared that he will never make it out of here and he’ll die strapped to this table, as a tool for people who hate his kind, degraded and used as some kind of mindless, enslaved -- tree. Feathers ripe for the picking.
He is fed and washed regularly by attendants who don’t meet his eyes as they work and ignore him when he pleads with them to let him go. They treat him like a statue, but keep Dongwoon from deteriorating from malnutrition or hypothermia. On the days that Dongwoon can’t muster enough strength to eat, they force-feed him. Some of them are gentler than others. Dongwoon is not allowed to die. He’s learned now why: if he dies, his wings will wither away into dust, and they, the scientists, the doctors, the grey-uniformed agents, will have lost out on a precious resource.
Because the energy from Dongwoon’s feathers is really quite powerful. Dongwoon gets to see their effects first hand when one day (afternoon? evening? night?), a blindfolded and gagged old man is brought into the room, and introduced to Dongwoon as Test Subject Number One.
He is an advanced spell-caster who has managed to kill over fifty CUBE agents. He is so layered in protection spells that he seemingly cannot be killed himself. Not yet, anyway.
Dongwoon is forced to watch as his doctor, still smiling in that impersonal way of hers, fills a syringe with a translucent, luminous liquid from a vial and plunge the needle straight into the old man’s neck. The man screams against his mouth gag, his agony stretching on and on, until his voice stops, hiccups, and his entire body goes as limp as a rag. The uniformed men previously holding him up drop him to the ground and he lands with a dull, heavy thump; one of them gives the dead man a kick in the ribs.
Dongwoon’s doctor holds up the vial. “I think that was very successful, don’t you?” she asks it, although Dongwoon knows she’s directing the question to him. “It took over a hundred of your feathers to perfect this potion, but it’s very potent, clearly. Imagine if we could administer it as a supplement in the city’s water supply. Imagine, Dongwoon. We regular, natural people would be fine. And you magic-folk, you freaks, you’d all just drop dead like the filthy insects that you are.”
Dongwoon spits; his ball of saliva lands somewhere near her feet. “I hope you rot in hell,” he says with passion.
The doctor pats him on the cheek. “Hell is reserved for monsters like you,” she says, her voice light like a reminder.
“Bit hypocritical of you guys to use spells then, if you hate us so much.”
“Sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the greater good. We are a division that fights fire with fire. Don’t think that I’m glad about it, though. Even those casters who have been recruited by the agency make me feel ill.”
If Dongwoon ever gets free, he thinks he might kill her with his bare hands.
Not if. When. When.
Because Doojoon had promised him, and Dongwoon trusts in that promise. Because he knows that the others are still searching for him, doing everything in their power to save him. This conviction is the only thing that is keeping Dongwoon sane.
But minutes and hours and days pass, and Dongwoon feels himself growing weaker with every second next.
When he sleeps, he no longer has nightmares -- his nightmare is real life, now. Instead, Dongwoon dreams of the sun. He dreams of sky, and freedom, and soaring.
The formula they’re forcing him to drink now is full of drugs, it seems, because even though Dongwoon feels like he’s camped out at death’s door, his wings are plush and full, the feathers brilliant and shining with health. The ones that are plucked from him are practically grown back overnight. Dongwoon has hated his wings before, but never has he hated them like this.
His doctor tells him, “Give up, Dongwoon. No one is going to save you. Be happy that you’ve got a role in the dawn of this new magic-less era.”
Dongwoon says, “Shut up. Shut up.”
He loses another feather.
It’s after the second spell-caster is killed (a young girl this time, a prodigy, who’d been lucid enough to see him as she was brought into the room; and had screamed at him to get out, somehow, please, don’t let them use you like this), Dongwoon starts to devise an escape plan in his head.
The next mealtime that rolls around -- always the same meal, so Dongwoon has no way to judge the time -- he feigns unconsciousness. When the attendant on duty grabs a hold of his chin to wake him up, Dongwoon lashes out at the man’s hand and bites down -- the man hollers and drops the tray of food. It hits the ground with a loud clanging and the brittle crashing of breaking glass.
If he won’t eat, then his wings will weaken. Simple. It’s not a very good plan, but it’s the only one Dongwoon can think of.
The next meal, Dongwoon doesn’t feign anything, but refuses to consume even a morsel of food.
The meal after that, Dongwoon spits on whatever comes within two feet of him. In retaliation, Dongwoon’s mouth is taped shut and an IV drip is wheeled in the room.
“You’re fighting for nothing,” his doctor says, clucking her tongue, as she slips the needle under his skin.
Dongwoon makes a muffled protest against the tape.
“What if I were to tell you that everyone you love is already dead? That everyone of your kind has already been wiped out?”
He doesn’t believe that, because just yesterday, Dongwoon had lost three feathers in order to experiment with a version of the potion that was supposed to be water-soluble. Still, he can’t help the sudden grip of fear on his insides, and the screaming in his head of NO.
“I think you need punishment for your little act of rebellion,” the doctor says. She picks up the usual syringe of anaesthetic and empties it on the ground. “This has always been a privilege, not a right. Deal without it. We’ll see how long it takes for you to break.”
The hours become much longer, after that.
---
“These runes are something else,” Yoseob whistles, foot scraping the chalk lines into streaks of dust. “Never seen such complicated ones before. No wonder we couldn’t anchor Dongwoon.”
Junhyung’s jaw tightens, Adam’s apple bobbing. Dongwoon can see it because Junhyung’s so close, running his hands over Dongwoon’s body -- a few inches away, not touching, but infusing that healing warmth into Dongwoon’s skin, checking for internal injuries. Without hesitating in his task, Junhyung snaps, “It won’t happen again.”
“I memorized them,” Dongwoon mentions, hypnotized by the yellow glow coming from Junhyung’s palms. “There’s not much else to stare at here. I can teach it to you, in exchange.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Those traditions you were going to teach me,” Dongwoon reminds him. “Of our people.”
Junhyung huffs a laugh, clearly surprised. “You’re an amazing kid, really.”
Would he still say that, if he knew that Dongwoon’s feathers had killed so many of their kind? Oh. “My feathers,” Dongwoon tells them abruptly. “They’ve got so many of my feathers here, I can’t--”
“Don’t worry,” Hyunseung says. “We’ll blow this whole place to smithereens. There won’t be a single trace left. We’ve left explosive spells at every foundation pillar in thi--”
“Stop.” Gikwang tenses noticeably, his entire body shifting into a defensive stance. Loudly, he announces, “We’ve got to go. They’re coming. They broke out.”
“Shit,” Junhyung mutters, speeding up the up-down movements of his hands. “I’m not ever halfway done -- how the hell did they get out of our illusion so fast?”
“Just look at the level of spells they could cast!” Yoseob cries, pointing at the ground. “And you’re surprised?! We totally underestimated them!”
“Calm down, I need to concentrate.”
“Let’s do that later,” Doojoon says, striding forward. “We’ve got to get Dongwoon out now.”
Junhyung scowls. “If we move him like this, we might do him more damage! Who knows what kind of treatment he’s gotten here the past few weeks!” He turns to Gikwang. “Can you hold them back for a little longer?”
Gikwang’s arms are stretched outwards into the air; there is a fine sheet of sweat on his forehead and temples. “I think so, but--” he starts to say, but then inhales sharply. “No. Too late. Here they come.”
The door bursts open.
---
“Dongwoonie.”
“Dongwoon!”
“Dongwoon, Dongwoon. I have food for you. Chili crab!”
“Are you dumb? That’s not going to work if he can’t smell it.”
“It’s worked before! I swear.”
“Dongwoonie if you don’t wake up right now I’m going to take a picture of your underpants and post it online.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. That is the stupidest--”
“What if we slapped him?”
Dongwoon cracks open his eyes and sees a very familiar face hovering in front of him. It immediately breaks out in a wide, relieved smile.
“Hey there, maknae,” Doojoon whispers. A cool hand cups Dongwoon’s sweaty, grimy cheek. “Sorry we’re so late.” Dongwoon feels a soft pressure as Doojoon leans in and rests his forehead against Dongwoon’s. “We’re really sorry. It took us so long to even find this place, damn. And when we found it, we had to find the blueprints of--”
“Shut up hyung!” Someone’s voice (Hyunseung?) snaps from somewhere nearby. “We’re on a schedule here! Apologize to Dongwoon all you want after we get him out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Doojoon sighs. He looks pained, but steps back, letting go of Dongwoon’s cheek. There, his expression clouds. “Dongwoon? Can you hear me?”
Dongwoon swallows, tries to gather his voice. His throat is hoarse; he’s strained it from screaming too much. “This is different from my usual dream,” he mutters.
Doojoon’s face darkens like a storm. In the blink of an eye, he’s back right in front of Dongwoon, his hands on Dongwoon’s shoulders. His gaze searches Dongwoon’s desperately.
“It’s not a dream, Dongwoon,” he says urgently. “We’re here, we’re here. We made it. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“That’s what you said last time and then I woke up.”
For an instant, Doojoon’s face cracks into something soft and open. “Oh. Did you? Well,” and he visibly braces himself, “this time I really mean it.”
“Prove it,” Dongwoon says.
Doojoon pauses. “Okay,” he says, and steps back, and back, and back. Dongwoon’s eyes follow him, warily, then with amazement. Because each step that Doojoon took backwards brought him closer to the other four people standing behind him: Hyunseung, Gikwang, Yoseob, Junhyung. They’re all here. And they’re all filthy. Gikwang’s got a streak of blood across one cheek, but he grins when he notices Dongwoon’s attention.
They’re dressed differently from what Dongwoon remembers.
In Dongwoon’s dreams, they’re always wearing the same clothes they had been in the club. They’re eager and pulling at Dongwoon to hurry up, come on, we’re getting you out of here and we’re going home, as if no time at all has passed between the time Dongwoon had been taken and the time now. Except it was never now, because it was always a dream. He’d thought the disappointment would get easier to take, over time. He’d been wrong.
But here, now now, they look older. Not like they’ve aged, but like they’ve been awake for too long, and seen things they hadn’t wanted to see. Older. Like they’ve been pushed and stretched and been forced back onto their feet one too many times, and still make the effort to keep on going, because there’s no other choice. Dongwoon can read novels from the fatigue showing from Yoseob’s limp hands, Junhyung’s half-opened-mouth breathing, the smudges under Hyunseung’s eyes, and the exhausted set of Gikwang’s shoulders. Dongwoon looks at Doojoon and sees the responsibility he’s piled upon himself, layers of it, thick, palpable - which hadn’t been there the last time Dongwoon had seen him for real.
And Dongwoon would never imagine his friends in pain.
“You’re here,” he croaks, voice wrecked now, not just from the soreness.
Doojoon’s tiny smile is heartbreaking. “We’re here,” he agrees. As Dongwoon watches, he reaches into his shirt collar and pulls out a thin black string. At the very end of hangs a small white feather. One by one, the others do the same. “Didn’t we promise?” says Doojoon.
“You did.”
“Then. Ready to go home?”
“Please,” Dongwoon says, and bows his head the best he can.
---
5) To bring people home.
---
“Hi. Why are you crying?”
Dongwoon’s head shot up, his hands scrabbling to wipe at his cheeks. “I’m not crying. I hurt my knees.”
“I can see that,” said the other boy. He had dark, messy hair and beetle-black eyes. He looked older than Dongwoon, but maybe not by much. Six? Seven? “I saw you jump off that branch,” the boy continued. “That was so stupid, you know?”
“Shut up!” Dongwoon gulped, swallowing down another sob. “I wasn’t jumping.”
“Sure looked that way to me.”
“I wasn’t! I was--” Never reveal your wings. A wave of panic flashed through him, causing Dongwoon to bite back his intended words. “I just fell off. I’m clumsy.”
“Why are you making this guy cry, Doojoonie?” Another boy walked casually up to them, chewing on a lollipop. He peered critically at Dongwoon’s knees. “You should get a band-aid for that. Or five.”
“Holy cow!” yelled yet another boy, jogging closer. He had close-cropped hair and really nice curved eyes to go with his smile. “This is him?”
“Who?” Dongwoon asked.
“The sixth player we need for our soccer game!” the first boy said hastily, hitting the newest boy’s head. “Don’t scare him!” he hissed.
“I don’t see your soccer ball,” Dongwoon said, narrowing his eyes warily at the boy with the lollipop who was still staring at Dongwoon’s scrapped knees with curious scrutiny, though looking bored while doing it.
Two more boys came running off the street, panting. One of them was wearing a too-large baseball cap and had round cheeks; the other boy had really bouncy hair and eyes that reminded Dongwoon of a cat. “What’s the hold-up? Who’s the crybaby?” he asked. Dongwoon flushed, upset.
He blurted out, “I’m not a crybaby! I’m Son Dongwoon, and I’m four years old and my dad’s a professor, and I’m--” he choked off his words again.
He’s what? What was he going to say? He was special because he had tiny little wings on his back? He was teased by the neighbour kids all the time for never playing games with them, and he never cried then? He didn’t get scared of a lot because he was scary himself, that he was one of those people he always saw being arrested on the news? He was lonely? He was trying to fly from that branch but had chickened out at the last second?
“You’re one of us,” the first boy butt in, grinning brightly. He grabbed Dongwoon’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “We’re gonna be your friends from now on, Dongwoonie. And we take care of our own. Come play soccer with us. My name’s Doojoon.”
Doojoon’s arm reached around Dongwoon’s shoulders for a hug. Almost imperceptibly, Dongwoon felt his rumpled t-shirt being tugged up his shoulder to his neckline. “There we go,” Doojoon said. “Now you’re fine.”
Dongwoon stared at him. Then followed him and his new friends to the park to play soccer. There wasn’t a ball, so they just pretended there was one. It was a terrible game, but Dongwoon had fun. No one jumped on his back or slapped his shoulders too hard or anything. When he got home later that afternoon, he checked his knees for bruises and was pleased to see the skin there clean and healthy, as if they’d never been scraped at all.
The next day, Doojoon showed up at his doorstep and asked if wanted to come play. He had a real soccer ball tucked under his arm and Dongwoon grinned as he ran down the front steps so quickly it felt like he was flying.
---
There are five, pristine white feathers lying in the centre of the elaborate chalk-drawn spell-circle on the floor, each one covering a different name, facing outwards like the hands of a clock. This is the first spell that Dongwoon will perform, and it is extremely, extremely likely that he will be caught, detained, tortured, and then executed for performing it. Had it been last month, these sorts of things would have concerned Dongwoon a lot more than they do now. Now, Dongwoon has a job to do. A promise to keep.
He throws down a match, watches the curl of smoke rise like weightless snakes as the fire drops, drops; the feathers alight immediately, and Dongwoon stands backs to wait.
(end)
Again, any clarifications needed about the timeline? Ask away! Thanks for reading, yo.
Title: Uses for Feathers
3) To perform spells.
---
Dongwoon had never thought of his wings as a gift. He couldn’t, for scores of reasons, think something like that, and not go insane with anger every time another news bulletin reported on another round-up of casters, celebrating the event as if the CUBE agents had captured deadly terrorists rather than lost children. In the kind of society he lived in, in which spell-casters were something (not even someones) to be reviled, Dongwoon wasn’t afforded the mindset needed to look at his wings and think of them as beautiful.
But he wasn’t sickened by them, either.
The difference between Dongwoon and the rest of the world was that Dongwoon had never been without his wings. Even a person with a hideous growth defect (which, arguably, was what Dongwoon had), if encountered with the same reflection in the mirror day after month after year, will eventually get used to the deformity. The shame and hate might or might not abate over time, but acceptance of the malformation would be unpreventable. Dongwoon did hate his wings, and he was ashamed of them, but they would not stop growing, and as he grew too, they became as natural, as him, as his nose or eyes or his right hand. Not something to dismiss, obviously, but not anything worth examining with interest anymore. Checking his clothes for stray feathers before going outside became as habitual as checking that his hair was combed neatly and his eyebrows were groomed.
Which was why he was shocked when, one day, while flapping his towel free of lingering feathers, one accidentally flew into a scented candle on his desk and the resulting explosion blew a hole in Dongwoon’s wall.
There had been trouble, of course. Dongwoon’s parents had to lie, tell the repairmen that Dongwoon was playing with fireworks he’d kept from New Year celebrations -- but even then, the lack of gunpowder residue around the room was doubtlessly blatant. Bribes and blackmail were also needed to stem the suspicion.
Spell-casting was a crime punishable by death. The country had a no tolerance policy about it. Offenders didn’t get any strikes. Many didn’t even get a trial. CUBE agency worked under the strict guidelines of better safe than sorry, and leaving casters alive made them very sorry indeed.
It was only after the incident with the wall that Dongwoon, twelve years old, finally understood the importance and depth of secrecy: not just for his own sake, but for his family’s. His mother’s teary eyes as she yelled at him for being so careless and then swept him up in a massive hug afterwards, his father’s wan, disappointed face as he ran a brush through the edges of Dongwoon’s wings to trim for any more loose feathers, before silently collecting them in a box to be taken to the university’s biological disposal room, just as he’d always done, but this time wordlessly.
He’d complained desperately to his sister at his parents’ continued silent treatment, saying that he was sorry already, that he’d learned his lesson.
His sister had punched him and told him that sorry doesn’t bring people back from the dead.
Never reveal your wings. Never reveal your wings.
---
It’s been a long day. Dongwoon’s wrecked. He’s still got questions -- novels of them -- but he can barely keep a straight though in his head from the fatigue. When Gikwang silently reaches around him holding up Dongwoon’s wing braces, Dongwoon doesn’t even think to protest; it’s only when the other boy’s hands smooth down one stretch of his wings that Dongwoon bodily twitches away out of instinct.
“Sorry, sorry,” Gikwang says hurriedly, eyes huge. “Didn’t mean to. I just -- can you fold them back up? We can’t leave here with your wings out.”
“We’re not leaving until we find every last one of Dongwoon’s feathers,” Doojoon corrects. He’s already pacing the room, eyes low and darting around the mess scattered around the floor. “It’s bad enough that those women got a handful; imagine if someone else found some more.”
As the others search, Dongwoon forces his wings to close, movements jerky. When he gets them flat enough, Gikwang says soothingly, “That’s good, Dongwoonie, I’m going to tie them down now, okay?” Dongwoon nearly scoffs; he wants to say that he’s not a child and doesn’t need to be treated like a doll, but he knows Gikwang is trying to help. It’s just jarring, to have someone else touch his wings. He lifts his arms accordingly as Gikwang ties the straps against Dongwoon’s torso, the worn leather cool and familiar against his skin. Once his wings are strapped, Dongwoon breathes an internal sigh of relief. There should be no more accidents now, although his shirt is kind of ruined. How is he going to explain that to his father? In fact, how is going to explain any of tonight?
“Do you think they were CUBE agents?” Yoseob asks, rifling through the mess of blankets on the bed.
“Why would CUBE agents want Dongwoonie’s feathers and not kill him?” Gikwang says.
“You idiot,” snaps Hyunseung. “Dongwoon’s feathers are pure magical energy. You could do anything with them, with the right spell.”
“Like what?” Dongwoon demands.
“Like make a curse to infect a caster,” Junhyung says grimly. He tsks. “They shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with a single feather. We’ve got to be on our guard non-stop, now.”
“No biggie,” Yoseob says with a grin. “We’re good for it. Ah, I found one!” he cries, pulling a tiny, white feather out from a pile of throw pillows.
“Me too, me too,” says Hyunseung, unearthing another from the blankets under the pillows.
They end up finding five feathers; Doojoon makes everyone do two sweeps of the entire room, just to be certain.
“What should we do with them?” Gikwang asks. “Do you want them back, Dongwoon?”
Dongwoon feels vaguely uncomfortable just looking at them in other people’s hands. “Uh, no thanks. Can’t glue them back or anything, can I? You guys get rid of them however is safest, I guess.”
“It could be a good idea to keep them. One each,” Doojoon suggests, twirling one in his fingers. “You never know when we might need one.”
“I don’t know any spells involving feathers,” Junhyung gripes. “It’s so old school.”
“Then learn some!”
“Hey, I think I’ll attach mine onto a necklace or something,” Hyunseung says eagerly.
“You don’t mind, Dongwoon? If we keep them?” Yoseob asks, gingerly holding his feather in a cupped palm. He strokes one finger along its hair-then bristles, ruffling the barbs ever so slightly.
“Why would I?” Dongwoon shrugs.
“Feathers symbolize a lot,” Junhyung explains, holding his feather up to the light. “You giving us your feathers, for instance. That shows trust. It’s something that we have to take seriously, with our traditions.”
“But I do trust you guys,” Dongwoon says bluntly. And then, “Will you teach me those traditions?”
Junhyung blinks at him, the corners of his lips twitching upwards. “Another day, for sure. But let’s get you home safely first.”
Dongwoon hadn’t noticed it before, but there’s a faint shimmering spread across the walls of the room, as if they’d been papered by a very thin layer of plastic wrap. At first he thinks he’s just seeing things, maybe there are some lingering effects of his injury he doesn’t know about or something, because the more he squints at the door to the room, the more blurry it gets.
Gikwang taps his arm. “It’s a shield,” he says. “We wanted to keep people from barging in while Junhyung was waking you up. It’s deflecting attention from us after the huge ruckus those girls made.”
“Can we get out?”
“Sure we can,” Gikwang nods, and strides up to the door. He places both his hands on the wooden panelling, fingers spread like a fan, and chants something quickly under his breath. The walls ripple, a flash of light pulsing outwards from Gikwang’s hands, and then abruptly, melt back to their regular dark red colouring. “Here we go.”
Magic? But -- “Wait,” Dongwoon rushes to say, “we just -- how do we explain the mess?”
“What mess?” Hyunseung drawls.
Dongwoon turns around. The room is perfectly clean and in order, every last pillow back on the bed and each broken glass returned to its proper form. Yoseob reaches over the bed to bat around some of the pillows and muss up the blankets.
“We can’t leave it too clean,” he says. “That’d be suspicious, I think.”
“What the hell,” says Dongwoon.
Yoseob winks at him. “I mean, you can’t think that we just sit around twiddling our fingers around, when we know how to use spells?”
“If you get caught--” starts Dongwoon.
“Gikwang’s barriers are great,” Doojoon interjects, shrugging. “Besides. We’ve done our research on CUBE; I think we could handle anything they throw at us. Well, hopefully. Let’s not go around asking for trouble.” He claps a sturdy hand on Dongwoon’s shoulder; Dongwoon surprises himself by not flinching. Not that he usually flinches around Doojoon, but it’s been a traumatic night. He tries to match Doojoon’s smile.
“Doing okay?” Doojoon asks.
Dongwoon doesn’t know. Things seem sharper, somehow, as if the knowledge he’s been given tonight has given it a new vibrancy, or shifted his body’s perspective on how to look at them. The world is suddenly a much larger place than Dongwoon remembers waking up in, but his feet on the ground feel steady and his wings feel secured. His friends are still here, always have been.
“It’ll be fine, Dongwoonie,” Doojoon reassures him. “No matter what, we’ll protect you.”
“I’m not a damsel in distress, hyung,” Dongwoon whines.
“But you’re our youngest,” Doojoon grins, leading him out the door. “So we’ve got to take care of you.”
Dongwoon’s about to protest those words, despite the warm feeling he gets in his stomach, but the second his foot steps out of the doorway to the private room, he feels something lurch horribly within him.
He whips around to stare at Doojoon. “Hyung,” he croaks.
“Dongwoon?” Doojoon grabs onto his wrist. “What’s going on?”
“Shit, shit,” Junhyung pushes forward to grab Dongwoon’s other wrist. “Look at his aura, it’s faltering. I’ve seen this once before: he’s getting summoned. Dongwoon, look at me, okay? Look at me.”
Dongwoon’s entire body is trembling. He can’t move. It’s as if his insides are slowly being disintegrated inside his body, bit by bit -- there’s no pain, but there’s a tidal wave of emptiness flooding through his core, leaving him cold and frozen. He takes a deep breath, keeping his eyes on Junhyung’s face, until he feels his heart jerk inside his ribcage and he has to squeeze closed his eyelids.
“What’s--” he manages to grit out.
He can hear Yoseob’s voice behind him, humming something high and melodic, one of his large hands pressing in the centre of Dongwoon’s back.
“How did they do this?” Doojoon demands, grip tightening fiercely on Dongwoon’s arms.
Junhyung shakes his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know. His feathers -- there must be some kind of link between him and his feathers, and if they use some kind of transportation or reunion spell -- Yoseob, skip to the next verse, we need a stronger anchoring.”
Yoseob’s stream of words quickly shifts into something harsh with consonants. Dongwoon clenches his jaw and tries to keep his mind from being ripped in half, like his body seems to be.
“Shit, it’s not enough,” Junhyung whispers. “It’s too late; fuck, how did those bitches act so quickly?” He looks to Doojoon, no attempt to keep the panic off his face. “Fuck, what do we do? We can’t stop it!”
Doojoon grabs Dongwoon’s face in his hands. A rapid slew of words spill out of him, his voice fiercely demanding, leaving no room for questioning. “Dongwoon, listen to me. You’re being taken somewhere, and once you get there, people are going to try to hurt you. They will try, but you can’t give in, okay? Whatever they do, don’t let them take your feathers. Don’t let them break you; your magic will be less powerful without your trust infused in it. Do your best. It won’t be for very long, because we’re going to find you, and we’re going to get you out. I promise. I promise we’ll come for you and get you back. Do you believe me?”
It takes all of Dongwoon’s strength to nod yes. When he blinks, Doojoon’s image seems to be getting further and further away from him. He feels surrounded by white; there is air funnelling into his ears, loud, icy, biting, carrying out everything within him.
Doojoon’s voice seems very far away. He’s saying, “We’ll get you out, Dongwoonie, just hold on. We’ll find you.”
Dongwoon tries to repeat himself, tell Doojoon that he believes him, that he won’t give in, he won’t let them down, but he takes one more breath and feels himself getting sucked out of the room -- gone, like an extinguished flame.
---
4) To be harvested.
---
With a pair of wings on his back, Dongwoon wasn’t allowed to take the simple things for granted. Security, comfort, trust in others -- these were all states that he experienced rarely, which made them precious. Regular, non-magical people were able to walk into a room and smile at strangers, shake their hands with confidence; Dongwoon could do this too, but he could never feel safe while doing it. His life was a never-ending walk over hot coals -- one step too far and that’s it. Done. Game over.
Nightmares were a given.
Dongwoon had quite a repertoire:
Imprisonment.
Decapitation.
Watching his parents die, before he was imprisoned and then decapitated.
Losing his friends -- his real friends, who Dongwoon had grown up with, who Dongwoon would trust with his life, because he’d read them wrong all along and they couldn’t get on with him if he was a freak.
Being tethered down, forced to lie flat on cold, hard pavement, while greasy, greedy fingers yanked mercilessly at his feathers, tearing them out in great fistfuls, pulling screams from his throat until he was practically braying with hysterics.
Never seeing the sun again, slowly dying from the inside out.
Each day Dongwoon spent normally at home was a relief, an accomplishment. Each time Dongwoon laughed with his friends hard enough to forget that he wasn’t just some normal teenager was a date to be treasured. A memory to keep.
When Doojoon, their nicknamed leader, had graduated high school, he’d promised all five of them that they’d stayed friends forever. The sentiment was cheesy, but the moment was sincere and had left Dongwoon reeling. He had taught himself not to depend on anything in the world, no matter how permanent it seemed, because all it took was one accident and everything could be upheaved by the root -- but he remembered thinking at that time that it was, maybe, okay to depend on those five guys.
---
“Is she dead?” Dongwoon asks.
Yoseob shoots him a look before stuffing his gun back into its holster. “What would make you feel better?”
“Not knowing people like her existed,” says Dongwoon truthfully.
Junhyung reaches over to hold his fingers to the woman’s neck. After a moment, he pulls away. “Dead,” he confirms.
Dongwoon doesn’t feel any sense of vindication, no split-second of good, I’m glad. He doesn’t feel any guilt, either. Instead, he feels hollowed out, as if he’s had his insides scooped out with a rusty spoon and the rest of his shell body aches with lack of -- substance. Looking at the body on the ground is difficult. Dongwoon shuts his eyes.
“She would have killed you once she was done with you,” Doojoon tells him. “That’s how these guys work.”
Dongwoon grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to think about this, about the last few days (weeks?). He wants to go home, sleep, and forget everything. “Can I come down now?” he says in a voice much louder than he’d expected.
Almost immediately there are hands pulling at his bindings, edging mania with their urgency.
Dongwoon turns his head to look at Gikwang’s tightly drawn face, then to his other side, where Hyunseung’s eyes are achingly dark and his lips are pinched.
“Really -- what Leader said before. We’re sorry we let them take you,” Gikwang whispers.
“I’m sorry I got taken,” says Dongwoon.
“You idiot, don’t say that like it’s your fault,” Hyunseung snaps, but softly.
“They’re my wings. How is it not my fault?” Dongwoon says wearily.
“We’re your hyungs. How is it not ours?” asks Doojoon, holding out his arms so Dongwoon can tumble into them as soon as the last of his torso bindings are unbuckled and ripped off his body. He catches Dongwoon with barely a step backwards to balance for Dongwoon’s weight, then sets his hands right below where Dongwoon’s wings sprout. He massages the skin there, his movements so faint that they’re almost indiscernible; still, Dongwoon can’t help his full-body shiver.
“I’ve got you, Dongwoonie,” Doojoon says, breath ruffling the hair at Dongwoon’s ear. “You’re safe. We’ve got you.”
Dongwoon clenches his eyes closed again. There’ll be time to cry later.
“Last ones,” Hyunseung calls, and Dongwoon feels the remaining cuffs tying down his ankles come loose with a slight slither of fabric and a clink of metal. He pitches forward, the blood rushing through his legs as he tries to catch himself.
“Slow, Dongwoon, it’s okay.”
Dongwoon bites back a hysterical laugh. What part of his at all is okay? He lowers his feet on the cold tiled floor of the room and gingerly lowers his weight to rest on his right foot -- and nearly sinks his teeth into his tongue as he holds down a scream.
---
“Hello, young one,” says a man, when Dongwoon regains consciousness. He is smiling at Dongwoon, but his smile is far from kind.
From there on, things only get worse.
“Where--?” Dongwoon mutters.
“A simple lab,” says the man amiably. “We’ve made it custom, just for you, boy.”
Dongwoon looks around fretfully: he’s in a large room with white walls and white tables and white equipment of unknown purpose. The entire floor, on the other hand, is pitch black and covered in chalk etchings: circles, triangles, words, symbols. Dongwoon knows he’s not a genius, but he’s got good intuition, and these kinds of runes look anything but friendly.
There’s the faint smell of ozone in the air -- something recently had been burning.
There are people, a few of them. People in lab coats and dark lab glasses, people who wear grey-blue gloves. There are also people in uniforms of the exact same shade of grey-blue, police issue, similar to the ones Dongwoon has seen on patrollers, cruising around at night for the homeless casters, sniffing around like bloodthirsty dog-catchers. These are CUBE employees, then. Or if not the main branch, a not-too-distant faction.
His worst nightmares, come to fruition.
In short order, Dongwoon is hauled up right and laid down on the hard, cool plastic of one of the man-length tables. His wrists and ankles and waist are all secured down by thick, black leather straps; Dongwoon struggles as much as he can, but he’s still weak from the -- whatever it was that brought him here. His head is spinning, and his stomach isn’t faring any better, but both feelings pale in comparison to the liquid fear that is infusing his entire body. Dongwoon could die here. Eighteen years old, right out of high school. They’ll do a DNA test and identify him and go after his family too.
“Let me go!” he shouts, pulling against his constraints. “Where am I? What do you want from me?”
“Come now,” a male voice says from behind him. “Don’t waste your energy on things you know will do you no good.”
The table he’s lying on begins to rise like a dentist’s chair, tilting him into a vertical position. A panel halfway down its length pops off, leaving sterile air to brush up against Dongwoon’s ruined shirt like a warning.
“No,” Dongwoon cries, trashing harder. “No! Let go of me! Let me--” he chokes mid-word when a gloved hand strokes down his spine, right between his closed wings. For a split second, Dongwoon’s stomach lurches with dread and he thinks he’s going to be horribly, violently sick, and then he feels the sharp pinch of a needle, and then, blackness.
When he cracks open his eyes again, his head is pounding, his entire body is sore, and there’s a short, black-haired woman peering at him, expression imperceptible behind her thick goggles.
“Awake?” she chirps. “I’ve been assigned as your doctor here, Son Dongwoon. You’re a very interesting specimen, I must say. I’m pleased to meet you.”
“A... doctor?” Dongwoon slurs. He aches all over. His tongue feels swollen in his mouth. How much time has passed? Is he still in the same room? What on earth is happening?
“I’m to make sure you don’t die, in these upcoming days.”
Dongwoon doesn’t know what to say to that.
“How are your wings?” she asks politely, although her tone is detached and clinical. “Do you have any feeling in them at all?”
The answer is no, because Dongwoon hadn’t even been aware that they’d been open, this entire time. His wings are open, the longest feathers trailing on the chalked-marked ground, and Dongwoon can’t feel a thing. His entire back is numb. Oh God. Dongwoon wills his back muscles to clench, tries to lift up his wings, tries to ruffle them, anything. They don’t as much as jerk. It’s as if someone had amputated them from Dongwoon’s control completely. Oh God.
“Good,” the doctor says, reading his stricken expression correctly. She walks over to a small table beside Dongwoon; on it is balanced a tin tray, arranged with shiny metal tools. She picks up a pair of long, long tweezers and smiles at them. “Then we can begin.”
---
A moment of suspended time: the doctor stares at the five intruders, and the five intruders stare back. Dongwoon forgets to breathe.
The moment breaks -- all at once, spells are being hurtled through the air, sending the room into a cacophony of lights and crackling explosions. Dongwoon turns his head away, unable to keep from flinching as the floor shudders and heaves. If he hadn’t been strapped down, Dongwoon would be on his knees now, trying to keep balance among the convulsions of a rocking battlefield.
A particularly loud shout from Doojoon catches Dongwoon’s attention, and he automatically whips his head back to the scene. What if one of them got hurt while Dongwoon was busy being scared shitless -- unacceptable, unacceptable -- but Doojoon’s fine. He’s roaring at the woman, except the air being expelled from his mouth is rippling the scenery between them. The doctor holds up her hands as if bracing against a wall, and her hair and coat are blown back from an invisible wind.
The door bursts open again, and a mob of uniforms come rushing in, guns at the ready.
From there, it’s chaos. Dongwoon watches in horror as the others throw themselves head first into the developing fight, power fizzling from their fingertips. He strains against his bindings for the millionth time, but they don’t give, of course they don’t. If he’d only been untied a little earlier--
His wings quiver in agitation and Dongwoon forces them still.
A particularly loud yell from Yoseob: “He’s not your prisoner!” he shouts at the female doctor, and lifts a gun in his hand. There’s a bang, and though Dongwoon doesn’t see a bullet or any smoke, the doctor jerks with the force of the impact and pitches to the ground, landing flat on her back. A thin trail of blood gurgles from her open mouth, and her eyes, always so cold and impassive behind her thick glasses, go dull and blank.
The noise settles. There are other bodies lying on the ground, now. Amidst them, Dongwoon’s friends stand, panting, but alive.
---
He doesn’t know how many days he spends there, caught in that laboratory like a fly in a spider’s web. He knows that he loses feathers by the hour, and although the anaesthetic they’d administered to him keeps him from feeling the pain of the plucking, internally, he still feels the loss of each one as keenly as a missing limb. They’re part of him, his most unique part, and they’re being harvested for -- for who knows what.
He is scared that his dad is out there, worried about him.
He is scared that his family has been captured and killed for raising him.
He is scared that he will never make it out of here and he’ll die strapped to this table, as a tool for people who hate his kind, degraded and used as some kind of mindless, enslaved -- tree. Feathers ripe for the picking.
He is fed and washed regularly by attendants who don’t meet his eyes as they work and ignore him when he pleads with them to let him go. They treat him like a statue, but keep Dongwoon from deteriorating from malnutrition or hypothermia. On the days that Dongwoon can’t muster enough strength to eat, they force-feed him. Some of them are gentler than others. Dongwoon is not allowed to die. He’s learned now why: if he dies, his wings will wither away into dust, and they, the scientists, the doctors, the grey-uniformed agents, will have lost out on a precious resource.
Because the energy from Dongwoon’s feathers is really quite powerful. Dongwoon gets to see their effects first hand when one day (afternoon? evening? night?), a blindfolded and gagged old man is brought into the room, and introduced to Dongwoon as Test Subject Number One.
He is an advanced spell-caster who has managed to kill over fifty CUBE agents. He is so layered in protection spells that he seemingly cannot be killed himself. Not yet, anyway.
Dongwoon is forced to watch as his doctor, still smiling in that impersonal way of hers, fills a syringe with a translucent, luminous liquid from a vial and plunge the needle straight into the old man’s neck. The man screams against his mouth gag, his agony stretching on and on, until his voice stops, hiccups, and his entire body goes as limp as a rag. The uniformed men previously holding him up drop him to the ground and he lands with a dull, heavy thump; one of them gives the dead man a kick in the ribs.
Dongwoon’s doctor holds up the vial. “I think that was very successful, don’t you?” she asks it, although Dongwoon knows she’s directing the question to him. “It took over a hundred of your feathers to perfect this potion, but it’s very potent, clearly. Imagine if we could administer it as a supplement in the city’s water supply. Imagine, Dongwoon. We regular, natural people would be fine. And you magic-folk, you freaks, you’d all just drop dead like the filthy insects that you are.”
Dongwoon spits; his ball of saliva lands somewhere near her feet. “I hope you rot in hell,” he says with passion.
The doctor pats him on the cheek. “Hell is reserved for monsters like you,” she says, her voice light like a reminder.
“Bit hypocritical of you guys to use spells then, if you hate us so much.”
“Sometimes, sacrifices must be made for the greater good. We are a division that fights fire with fire. Don’t think that I’m glad about it, though. Even those casters who have been recruited by the agency make me feel ill.”
If Dongwoon ever gets free, he thinks he might kill her with his bare hands.
Not if. When. When.
Because Doojoon had promised him, and Dongwoon trusts in that promise. Because he knows that the others are still searching for him, doing everything in their power to save him. This conviction is the only thing that is keeping Dongwoon sane.
But minutes and hours and days pass, and Dongwoon feels himself growing weaker with every second next.
When he sleeps, he no longer has nightmares -- his nightmare is real life, now. Instead, Dongwoon dreams of the sun. He dreams of sky, and freedom, and soaring.
The formula they’re forcing him to drink now is full of drugs, it seems, because even though Dongwoon feels like he’s camped out at death’s door, his wings are plush and full, the feathers brilliant and shining with health. The ones that are plucked from him are practically grown back overnight. Dongwoon has hated his wings before, but never has he hated them like this.
His doctor tells him, “Give up, Dongwoon. No one is going to save you. Be happy that you’ve got a role in the dawn of this new magic-less era.”
Dongwoon says, “Shut up. Shut up.”
He loses another feather.
It’s after the second spell-caster is killed (a young girl this time, a prodigy, who’d been lucid enough to see him as she was brought into the room; and had screamed at him to get out, somehow, please, don’t let them use you like this), Dongwoon starts to devise an escape plan in his head.
The next mealtime that rolls around -- always the same meal, so Dongwoon has no way to judge the time -- he feigns unconsciousness. When the attendant on duty grabs a hold of his chin to wake him up, Dongwoon lashes out at the man’s hand and bites down -- the man hollers and drops the tray of food. It hits the ground with a loud clanging and the brittle crashing of breaking glass.
If he won’t eat, then his wings will weaken. Simple. It’s not a very good plan, but it’s the only one Dongwoon can think of.
The next meal, Dongwoon doesn’t feign anything, but refuses to consume even a morsel of food.
The meal after that, Dongwoon spits on whatever comes within two feet of him. In retaliation, Dongwoon’s mouth is taped shut and an IV drip is wheeled in the room.
“You’re fighting for nothing,” his doctor says, clucking her tongue, as she slips the needle under his skin.
Dongwoon makes a muffled protest against the tape.
“What if I were to tell you that everyone you love is already dead? That everyone of your kind has already been wiped out?”
He doesn’t believe that, because just yesterday, Dongwoon had lost three feathers in order to experiment with a version of the potion that was supposed to be water-soluble. Still, he can’t help the sudden grip of fear on his insides, and the screaming in his head of NO.
“I think you need punishment for your little act of rebellion,” the doctor says. She picks up the usual syringe of anaesthetic and empties it on the ground. “This has always been a privilege, not a right. Deal without it. We’ll see how long it takes for you to break.”
The hours become much longer, after that.
---
“These runes are something else,” Yoseob whistles, foot scraping the chalk lines into streaks of dust. “Never seen such complicated ones before. No wonder we couldn’t anchor Dongwoon.”
Junhyung’s jaw tightens, Adam’s apple bobbing. Dongwoon can see it because Junhyung’s so close, running his hands over Dongwoon’s body -- a few inches away, not touching, but infusing that healing warmth into Dongwoon’s skin, checking for internal injuries. Without hesitating in his task, Junhyung snaps, “It won’t happen again.”
“I memorized them,” Dongwoon mentions, hypnotized by the yellow glow coming from Junhyung’s palms. “There’s not much else to stare at here. I can teach it to you, in exchange.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Those traditions you were going to teach me,” Dongwoon reminds him. “Of our people.”
Junhyung huffs a laugh, clearly surprised. “You’re an amazing kid, really.”
Would he still say that, if he knew that Dongwoon’s feathers had killed so many of their kind? Oh. “My feathers,” Dongwoon tells them abruptly. “They’ve got so many of my feathers here, I can’t--”
“Don’t worry,” Hyunseung says. “We’ll blow this whole place to smithereens. There won’t be a single trace left. We’ve left explosive spells at every foundation pillar in thi--”
“Stop.” Gikwang tenses noticeably, his entire body shifting into a defensive stance. Loudly, he announces, “We’ve got to go. They’re coming. They broke out.”
“Shit,” Junhyung mutters, speeding up the up-down movements of his hands. “I’m not ever halfway done -- how the hell did they get out of our illusion so fast?”
“Just look at the level of spells they could cast!” Yoseob cries, pointing at the ground. “And you’re surprised?! We totally underestimated them!”
“Calm down, I need to concentrate.”
“Let’s do that later,” Doojoon says, striding forward. “We’ve got to get Dongwoon out now.”
Junhyung scowls. “If we move him like this, we might do him more damage! Who knows what kind of treatment he’s gotten here the past few weeks!” He turns to Gikwang. “Can you hold them back for a little longer?”
Gikwang’s arms are stretched outwards into the air; there is a fine sheet of sweat on his forehead and temples. “I think so, but--” he starts to say, but then inhales sharply. “No. Too late. Here they come.”
The door bursts open.
---
“Dongwoonie.”
“Dongwoon!”
“Dongwoon, Dongwoon. I have food for you. Chili crab!”
“Are you dumb? That’s not going to work if he can’t smell it.”
“It’s worked before! I swear.”
“Dongwoonie if you don’t wake up right now I’m going to take a picture of your underpants and post it online.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. That is the stupidest--”
“What if we slapped him?”
Dongwoon cracks open his eyes and sees a very familiar face hovering in front of him. It immediately breaks out in a wide, relieved smile.
“Hey there, maknae,” Doojoon whispers. A cool hand cups Dongwoon’s sweaty, grimy cheek. “Sorry we’re so late.” Dongwoon feels a soft pressure as Doojoon leans in and rests his forehead against Dongwoon’s. “We’re really sorry. It took us so long to even find this place, damn. And when we found it, we had to find the blueprints of--”
“Shut up hyung!” Someone’s voice (Hyunseung?) snaps from somewhere nearby. “We’re on a schedule here! Apologize to Dongwoon all you want after we get him out of here.”
“Okay, okay,” Doojoon sighs. He looks pained, but steps back, letting go of Dongwoon’s cheek. There, his expression clouds. “Dongwoon? Can you hear me?”
Dongwoon swallows, tries to gather his voice. His throat is hoarse; he’s strained it from screaming too much. “This is different from my usual dream,” he mutters.
Doojoon’s face darkens like a storm. In the blink of an eye, he’s back right in front of Dongwoon, his hands on Dongwoon’s shoulders. His gaze searches Dongwoon’s desperately.
“It’s not a dream, Dongwoon,” he says urgently. “We’re here, we’re here. We made it. We’re going to get you out of here.”
“That’s what you said last time and then I woke up.”
For an instant, Doojoon’s face cracks into something soft and open. “Oh. Did you? Well,” and he visibly braces himself, “this time I really mean it.”
“Prove it,” Dongwoon says.
Doojoon pauses. “Okay,” he says, and steps back, and back, and back. Dongwoon’s eyes follow him, warily, then with amazement. Because each step that Doojoon took backwards brought him closer to the other four people standing behind him: Hyunseung, Gikwang, Yoseob, Junhyung. They’re all here. And they’re all filthy. Gikwang’s got a streak of blood across one cheek, but he grins when he notices Dongwoon’s attention.
They’re dressed differently from what Dongwoon remembers.
In Dongwoon’s dreams, they’re always wearing the same clothes they had been in the club. They’re eager and pulling at Dongwoon to hurry up, come on, we’re getting you out of here and we’re going home, as if no time at all has passed between the time Dongwoon had been taken and the time now. Except it was never now, because it was always a dream. He’d thought the disappointment would get easier to take, over time. He’d been wrong.
But here, now now, they look older. Not like they’ve aged, but like they’ve been awake for too long, and seen things they hadn’t wanted to see. Older. Like they’ve been pushed and stretched and been forced back onto their feet one too many times, and still make the effort to keep on going, because there’s no other choice. Dongwoon can read novels from the fatigue showing from Yoseob’s limp hands, Junhyung’s half-opened-mouth breathing, the smudges under Hyunseung’s eyes, and the exhausted set of Gikwang’s shoulders. Dongwoon looks at Doojoon and sees the responsibility he’s piled upon himself, layers of it, thick, palpable - which hadn’t been there the last time Dongwoon had seen him for real.
And Dongwoon would never imagine his friends in pain.
“You’re here,” he croaks, voice wrecked now, not just from the soreness.
Doojoon’s tiny smile is heartbreaking. “We’re here,” he agrees. As Dongwoon watches, he reaches into his shirt collar and pulls out a thin black string. At the very end of hangs a small white feather. One by one, the others do the same. “Didn’t we promise?” says Doojoon.
“You did.”
“Then. Ready to go home?”
“Please,” Dongwoon says, and bows his head the best he can.
---
5) To bring people home.
---
“Hi. Why are you crying?”
Dongwoon’s head shot up, his hands scrabbling to wipe at his cheeks. “I’m not crying. I hurt my knees.”
“I can see that,” said the other boy. He had dark, messy hair and beetle-black eyes. He looked older than Dongwoon, but maybe not by much. Six? Seven? “I saw you jump off that branch,” the boy continued. “That was so stupid, you know?”
“Shut up!” Dongwoon gulped, swallowing down another sob. “I wasn’t jumping.”
“Sure looked that way to me.”
“I wasn’t! I was--” Never reveal your wings. A wave of panic flashed through him, causing Dongwoon to bite back his intended words. “I just fell off. I’m clumsy.”
“Why are you making this guy cry, Doojoonie?” Another boy walked casually up to them, chewing on a lollipop. He peered critically at Dongwoon’s knees. “You should get a band-aid for that. Or five.”
“Holy cow!” yelled yet another boy, jogging closer. He had close-cropped hair and really nice curved eyes to go with his smile. “This is him?”
“Who?” Dongwoon asked.
“The sixth player we need for our soccer game!” the first boy said hastily, hitting the newest boy’s head. “Don’t scare him!” he hissed.
“I don’t see your soccer ball,” Dongwoon said, narrowing his eyes warily at the boy with the lollipop who was still staring at Dongwoon’s scrapped knees with curious scrutiny, though looking bored while doing it.
Two more boys came running off the street, panting. One of them was wearing a too-large baseball cap and had round cheeks; the other boy had really bouncy hair and eyes that reminded Dongwoon of a cat. “What’s the hold-up? Who’s the crybaby?” he asked. Dongwoon flushed, upset.
He blurted out, “I’m not a crybaby! I’m Son Dongwoon, and I’m four years old and my dad’s a professor, and I’m--” he choked off his words again.
He’s what? What was he going to say? He was special because he had tiny little wings on his back? He was teased by the neighbour kids all the time for never playing games with them, and he never cried then? He didn’t get scared of a lot because he was scary himself, that he was one of those people he always saw being arrested on the news? He was lonely? He was trying to fly from that branch but had chickened out at the last second?
“You’re one of us,” the first boy butt in, grinning brightly. He grabbed Dongwoon’s hand and pulled him to his feet. “We’re gonna be your friends from now on, Dongwoonie. And we take care of our own. Come play soccer with us. My name’s Doojoon.”
Doojoon’s arm reached around Dongwoon’s shoulders for a hug. Almost imperceptibly, Dongwoon felt his rumpled t-shirt being tugged up his shoulder to his neckline. “There we go,” Doojoon said. “Now you’re fine.”
Dongwoon stared at him. Then followed him and his new friends to the park to play soccer. There wasn’t a ball, so they just pretended there was one. It was a terrible game, but Dongwoon had fun. No one jumped on his back or slapped his shoulders too hard or anything. When he got home later that afternoon, he checked his knees for bruises and was pleased to see the skin there clean and healthy, as if they’d never been scraped at all.
The next day, Doojoon showed up at his doorstep and asked if wanted to come play. He had a real soccer ball tucked under his arm and Dongwoon grinned as he ran down the front steps so quickly it felt like he was flying.
---
There are five, pristine white feathers lying in the centre of the elaborate chalk-drawn spell-circle on the floor, each one covering a different name, facing outwards like the hands of a clock. This is the first spell that Dongwoon will perform, and it is extremely, extremely likely that he will be caught, detained, tortured, and then executed for performing it. Had it been last month, these sorts of things would have concerned Dongwoon a lot more than they do now. Now, Dongwoon has a job to do. A promise to keep.
He throws down a match, watches the curl of smoke rise like weightless snakes as the fire drops, drops; the feathers alight immediately, and Dongwoon stands backs to wait.
(end)
Again, any clarifications needed about the timeline? Ask away! Thanks for reading, yo.