THE STARS IN YOUR EYES | JEONGCHAN

six

Chan kisses hard, lips pressing against Jeongin's as firmly as the hands on his waist. He arcs into the astronaut, freezing cold hands circling his hips tighter. It feels like bliss. Like euphoria, with no one but the stars to watch them.

Some thoughts dimly register in the back of his brain— like the fact that he's kissing a stranger— but it doesn't matter. He's actually feeling a human's contact for the first time in years. It's heavenly, the hands on his waist and the lips on his own. Jeongin had forgotten what human skin felt like.

The hands on his waist slip farther, under his shirt, and suddenly they don't feel like hands anymore. They feel scaly and smooth, with long sharp claws that threaten to gauge into his skin.

Jeongin flinches back, and he's not met with the face of the man he just kissed. Instead, emerald green scales in the same viridescent shade as the ship cover what was once a man, and glowing yellow eyes meet his eyes. A long, pink forked tongue flicks out of his mouth, and Jeongin screams.

And then Chan, a snake, reverses their positions and pins him against the mirrored wall. Jeongin wrenches his neck desperately, wanting to admire the glistening galaxy instead of the serpentine face inches from his own. But claws dig into his chin, wrenching his face backs, and Jeongin wonders what was so bad about the life he lived before that made him so eager to take a sketchy escape.

And then he remembers the days where tumoltuous earthquakes shook the ground and water cascaded from the ceiling, when his skin turned green from the weathering disease and his lips dark purple. All the nights spent crying unused tears into bedsheets. It was bad.

But not as bad as this.

Jeongin scolds himself for being too desperate, too naïve to think this could possibly work in a universe. He knows aliens haven't been scientifically verified, but he still should have considered the possibility.

Now he's alone, clothes a wreck and skin pale with the ghost of fear, and seconds away from death.

As the fangs dripping with drool dip into his neck, the claws on his neck loosen. When the haziness of fatigue kicks in and the muscles in his body loosen with the poison, Jeongin takes one last look at the universe he'd dreamed about.

He hopes he'll be one of those stars one day.

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