Belated Bloom - Lay (EXOxLay)

The Flip-side

+ Healing +

Zhang Yixing knew the world was cruel- most people thought he was a sweet innocent angel who could never understand the horrors everyone faced day to day. But of course, he did! People really think someone could get by on good vibes alone? No, it takes intelligence, cunning, perseverance and an elusive spirit to get into this business.

Not all idols have all those skills but at least one is necessary and all of them are roots from a seed, and that seed is experience. Experience with the real world, experience with the monsters and tricksters that plague every single human life on the planet earth. Yet somehow Yixing is put into this category of the innocent, when in actuality his mind and life are very much the opposite.

He has to fight his own demons and jump over the hurdles life throws at him, just like the rest of the world. Then, there's a moment, a moment where you lose your balance. All hell breaks loose, and you trip over one of those hurdles, big or small, and fall face first into the drudges of the world; addiction, hate, greed, depression, you name it- it's waiting there, waiting for you to fall when you are at your weakest.

Maybe people think he's some amazing person who just soars over all those hurdles on snowy white wings of an angel, but even if he had those wings they were ripped out long ago.

For a while now he had been scraping the bottom of the barrel- circling the drain if you will- just waiting-no, hoping for it all to end. In hindsight, his original dream had been innocent and naive, a dream of Exo as a pack all together. Such positive thoughts those were, and slowly but surely, he was robbed of that dream and those positive thoughts by the people around him and by circumstance, to the point of becoming the empty shell, devoid of feeling and happiness, that he currently inhabits.

And what remains of him now lies limp on a thin white mattress, on a stretcher in an ambulance with only the emergency care staff and his racing thoughts to keep him company. He's all alone, and struggling to stay awake but all he can think about is his pack- 'oh wait, that's not right. They aren't his pack, they are Exo pack, and I'm just Zhang Yixing the spare member'. And as it would seem, they are perfectly fine without him.

The loud wail of sirens ring out through the cold, silent night as the ambulance races through the streets of Tokyo. An ambulance carrying a sweet angel who deserved the world and had been given hell instead. The sirens almost give the angel comfort, the loud noise drowns out his depressing thoughts and he begins to drift out of consciousness.

"Sir please stay awake" the EMT repeats loudly in English whenever his eyes begin to droop.

'It's no use...they don't want me, they never wanted me.' tears begin to slip down his pale cheeks to the white sheet below. Yixing ignores the insistent calls of the woman next to him and closes his eyes, hoping to block out the noise in his last moments of consciousness. In his mind's eye he broken heartedly conjures up that naive dream he once had; an image of 11 boys, all happily smiling at him, all lounging together calling for Yixing to join them. But as Yixing moves closer the others move farther and farther away until all Yixing knows is the nothingness of the black void that surrounds him.

Years Earlier

Before Exo, before SM training, Yixing had one objective in mind- to love and be loved. Most days that meant he generally loved humanity and hoped for the people around him to love him back.

He was very young when he entered the entertainment business and had seen quite a few unsightly things, but still he had persevered, knowing that not everyone was rude and arrogant like many in that circle had been.