hold me 𐦍 yeonbin

039 ᯓᡣ𐭩

Yeonjun rolls onto his stomach, pushing off the ground before falling face first into the fake dirt. When Soobin reaches for him, Yeonjun crawls away.

“It’s me, Soobin,” Soobin says again. “Yeonjun?”

Yeonjun is unresponsive. Soobin makes an executive decision to pick him up despite how invasive it feels. He can handle an offended Yeonjun as long as he’s an alive Yeonjun.

As gentle as he can, Soobin rolls Yeonjun into his hand, scooping his tiny, shivering body out of the fake grass. The way Yeonjun panics and struggles out of Soobin’s gloved hands has Soobin choking back a sob.

“I’ll kill you,” Yeonjun mumbles, his voice not much higher in pitch while exponentially smaller and quieter than usual.

“You can kill me all you want at Siyeon’s house,” Soobin says, “but right now we have to hurry, so, I’m sorry for this.”

Yeonjun fights Soobin’s every attempt to gently coax him into his hands. He barely opens his eyes to look at Soobin before rolling away again and mumbling about how he is going to kill him.

“Yeonjun, please,” Soobin begs.

When Soobin tries again, his hand hovering above Yeonjun’s tiny frame, Yeonjun kicks him weakly. Even through the gloves Yeonjun’s body is like ice. His lack of body mass to store heat makes even a summer night like tonight something deadly.

Soobin doesn’t know how long Siyeon can hold her spell, how much time he has, so he lifts Yeonjun from the grass, careful not to put pressure on his wings, and, cupping Yeonjun in his hands, presses him into his chest.

“I’ll kill you,” he says into Soobin’s chest, so quiet Soobin almost doesn’t catch it.

A barely alive, barely conscious pixie wants to kill him. Soobin can handle it. It’s not the first time.

Yeonjun struggles so Soobin holds him tighter. He’ll have time to cry about the way Yeonjun fights like Soobin is going to tear off his wings again when they’re far away from the zoo.

On the way out of the hall, a banner with Yeonjun’s body from the wings down looms above the exhibit. It looks like they’ve spent just as much of their budget on advertisement as on their security. A waste of budget for Yeonjun to be plucked out of their evil hands before they’ve remade their money.

Soobin stops running halfway and tilts his hands away from his chest, afraid that he’s going to open them to a pile of dust. Yeonjun is still there, breathing in tiny.

“I’ll k-kill—” Yeonjun shivers, “—every f-fucking one of you.”

The worst way Yeonjun could view Soobin is as if he were the enemy, like the doctors. After every attempt he made to get Yeonjun to open up and to accept that he was wrong about many things, after every game they played together and kisses they shared, Yeonjun sees Soobin as a human, no different from his captors.

It is as if Yeonjun has lost his ability to recognize Soobin by his heartbeat, or that it does not matter to him anymore. A human is a human—not a monster, not a demon born from evil, but a human, which is even worse.

“Yeonjun, I—” Soobin seizes up at the sight of Yeonjun in his hands. To Yeonjun, these hands do not belong to a friend or even an ally. Soobin remembers the way Yeonjun described doctors with fake eyes and songless hearts and cold, texturless hands.

Cursing and shaking and not thinking straight, Soobin drops to the ground and rests Yeonjun on his lap to keep him close while he peels off the gloves and shoves them in his pocket. He then scoops Yeonjun’s icy body against his chest again and closes his fingers firmly around Yeonjun so no heat escapes. With the gloves out of the way, Yeonjun’s skin already feels like it is absorbing from Soobin’s body heat.