Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bam’s first memory of being left is not a memory at all—just the awareness, one day, that he was alone in a dark space, and that perhaps that had not always been the case. There had been the faint intuition that someone had put him there, that there was a ‘someone’—who hadn’t wanted him. 

Most of his time in that dark cave is a blur, now—the sound of fingernails scrabbling on stone, the echoes of his own breathing in the dark, the dig of rocky edges into his heel as he tried to climb his way out.

And then there had been Rachel—golden and concerned and smiling, and most of all, there. Her face had crumpled at the way his face crumpled; she had scrambled down the pile of rocks he’d scrambled up, and then she had been there—her hands in his hair, her shoulder pressed against his, her voice in that cave, echoing and responding to his. 

“So you don’t remember anything, huh?” she had said, soft and crestfallen. She had sounded sad for him, but Bam hadn’t been sad at all. He was fine with not remembering the person who had left him, was fine with his memories starting with Rachel. 

Memories need something to anchor to—words, languages, thoughts, people. Rachel had given him language. Rachel gave him memory.

And so Bam’s second memory of being left is technicolor-vivid. Bam remembers the degree of the slant in her smile, the sprinkle of freckles across her nose, the breathlessness of her voice, the patch of dust on her shoulder from where he’d bowled her over. There is so much he remembers. Mostly, he remembers pleading with her not to go. “Forget about me,” she’d said, as if she hadn’t been the one to take that ability away from him in the first place. Bam had wanted to cry with frustration at the impossibility of her ask. 

He thinks that might be why he’s so good at remembering things now. Bam knows exactly where his memories start, exactly who had bequeathed them to him. He knows exactly when that person left him.

And so Bam knows exactly what’s going on, when he sees Khun exit the safety of his lighthouse. 

It’s an ambush. They are surrounded by Rankers. There’s one in front of him now, and Bam doesn’t have time for this—he blindly fires a blast of shinsu to knock him out of the way in his haste to get to Khun. He doesn’t know how the 2nd Squadron found them—there hasn’t been time to convene and strategize. They’re barely standing. For every Ranker that Bam fights off, ten more seem to materialize in his place. Behind the sea of soldiers is an ominous-looking warship, and from the way Khun and Shibisu are shouting at each other, Bam knows that the ship is functioning as the squadron’s command center. This is a disadvantage even Bam can understand—this attack is premeditated and organized, and Bam’s side is too busy not-dying to properly plan a counterattack.

They’re fighting them the best they can, but White’s in a one-on-one brawl with the Squadron Commander and Karaka’s on another floor entirely, and as much as they call for backup, no one will get here in time. Endorsi had taken a bad blow to her ankle in a moment of carelessness, and is relying entirely on Bong Bong to stay afoot. This is a blitz-attack, an ambush meant to surprise, and it’s clear from the sheer size of the attack that they’re not leaving without captives. But—

“The issue isn’t the size,” Khun had snapped a few minutes ago, over comms. “The issue is the fucking commander hiding on their warship. His orders are the only reason why these Rankers are a problem. But we can’t get to him without getting captured, with this wall of soldiers in the way. How the fuck—” 

And then, a pause. 

Bam had felt panic shoot up fast and cold, from his abdomen to his throat, immediately imagining the worst—until he’d looked over, and calmed. Khun was fine. Was still in his lighthouse, unharmed. Just quiet. Thinking. He must have thought of something.

Endorsi seemed to reach the same conclusion. “If you have a plan,” she’d hissed in between parries, favoring her left side, “could you please share with the class?”

Khun had ignored her, and Bam had trusted that silence, had trusted Khun’s ability to get them out of this place, had been happy to wait for further orders.

But then Khun had said, “Fall back.”

“What are you talking about?” Hatz demands now, his voice scratching over the comms. 

“Fall back,” Khun repeats, cool and calm, “but make it convincing.” 

“Why?!” Endorsi screeches, sounding as confused and frustrated as Bam feels, only she hasn’t realized yet—she doesn’t know yet, what Khun is trying to do.

But Bam does, and the knowledge of it steals his voice away.

Blood is dripping into his eyes from a head wound and it paints the world red, but even in this sea of red, he can make out Khun’s blue. 

There he stands—tall, shoulders back, chin up, head held high. His hair is a frenzied flutter, the wind battering it from all directions, like it too is screaming at Khun in a panic— get away from here, get the fuck out of here, run run run —

Later, Bam will remember that there were signs beyond just his own sixth sense for being abandoned—that there would’ve been no reason for Khun to climb out of his lighthouse and make himself seen, only to tell his team to retreat. But for now, Bam focuses on this: The degree of the slant in his smile, the quiet in his voice, the set of his shoulders underneath his jacket. Composed, confident, steady. A leader taking a last stand, a commander to be killed.

This is a suicide mission, and Khun plans to go it alone.

He needs to say something. He needs to cross that distance and drag Khun away, what is he doing, what is he doing —

Shouts and yells, confusion and confusion and confusion. A sea of people between himself and Khun. Too dense to think, too dense to breathe. He can’t breathe. Someone needs to breathe. Why has no one else realized? He’s not going to get there in time. He’s not going to get there in time. He’s not going to get there in time.

“Fall back,” Khun says, and it sounds a lot like forget about me.

“Wait,” he hears someone scream, and realizes a second too late that it’s his own voice—unearthed at last, ragged at the edges, desperate and hoarse and afraid. “Stop!”

He doesn’t understand strategy. He has no idea of Khun’s strategy—only a premonition of being left, only the afterimage of Khun’s resolution, imprinted on the insides of his eyelids like a memory. Technicolor, anchored in fear.

“Where’s he going?”

Screaming. Running. Fire. A lightshow of shinsu like dying fireworks. A cacophony of color and sound. Somewhere in that chaos, he hears his name.

“Bam, stop!”  

The world exists in pieces. There is the sound of his heart pounding, blood rushing in his head. There is a swirl of colors as people move, as people run. There is a breeze in his hair, an ache in his calves. He must be moving.

Then the pieces rearrange themselves. There is a ceiling above his head and it is made of stone. There is a girl pinned beneath him and she is dissolving into gold. 

His hands tremble with the barely controlled urge—to break things, to devour and destroy them. The world fades to black. There is nothing, only himself and his fear. It razes gold; it consumes him until there’s nothing of himself left, until it’s just fear and fear and fear, all crammed into a tiny pinpoint—so cold that it burns, sublime and uncontainable.

Forget about me.

Cold fear, burning into fury. A chorus of souls in his body, clamoring to be heard. 

In his vision: a black vignette—the warship, that fucking command center, compressing into itself from the force of his anger. Then—a firework, an explosion outward, a chrysanthemum frozen in time, pulling apart at the seams, disintegrating at the next intake of breath, reverberating through his ribcage. The thought is viciously satisfying. 

And then—silence.

Muted silence, dark and cool. 

Whatever that strange feeling was, it has bubbled over. He thinks he can breathe again, so he tries to. He’s not good at this, at rational planning and careful thought, but he has to try. He has to get everyone out of here. 

The afterimage of the gold lightshow of his consciousness fades away into small sparks, and he blinks a few times, trying to clear the gold aftershocks from his vision entirely. It’s a little strange that he’s still seeing them.

He presses the palm of his hand over his eyes and tries to force them out—then realizes, with a jolt, that the gold sparks aren’t in his head at all. The silence isn’t in his head either. 

The world is silent.

He blinks his eyes back open, unsettled.

There is actual gold dust drifting past his nose, only it isn’t gold, but debris—ash that’s still burning, rapidly fading evidence of the warship that was once there. Of the squadron, the sea of Rankers, that were once there. 

Once there, and now gone.

His blood runs cold.

“Bam,” comes a hoarse voice from behind him. He whirls around—and there’s Khun, barely upright but still stumbling over to him, eyes wide and jaw dropped. Blood runs in a sickly trickle down his face. “Bam, what did you do?”

“The issue isn’t the size. The issue is the fucking commander hiding on their warship. His orders are the only reason why these Rankers are a problem. But we can’t get to him without getting captured, with this wall of soldiers in the way. How the fuck—” 

It takes the time for the words to make it halfway out his mouth for Khun to figure out the answer to his own question. It’s laughably simple, and the only reason it takes him this long to get there is the fact that he hasn’t had time to breathe since the ambush started, let alone think. Once he does get there, the rest of it takes less than a second:

The 2nd Squadron is here for blood, but they want a live captive. That much is obvious from the floating cuffs and prison cells hovering adjacent to the army warship. That fucking warship. 

But they would rather have a dead captive than no captive at all. Hence the size of the army. 

None of the Rankers have any clue what they’re up against, or how to organize themselves—obvious from the lack of coordination in small clusters, once isolated; obvious from the way the more important Rankers, when pushed to the edge of defeat, pause for a few seconds and then come roaring back, clever in a way they weren’t before.

Someone is feeding them directions, and that person is hiding on the warship.

A quick glance at the size of the remaining forces and some off-the-cuff mental math tells Khun that they could push their way past the army if they had to. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it would take a heavier toll on Bam than Khun would like—but it would be possible. 

But none of the Rankers look concerned, which means the person on the enemy warship isn’t concerned. 

Conclusion—there’s backup coming.

Once those dots are connected, the corollary is obvious—Jahad’s Army won’t leave without a captive, and Khun’s team can’t get past the army as long as the person in the warship is doling out orders. Someone needs to be “captured”, be brought to close enough proximity to the warship, and kill the commander.

Either the person succeeds in killing the commander, and Khun’s team escapes; or the person dies trying, but causes enough chaos on the enemy warship to give his team time to escape. Both are acceptable enough outcomes. It doesn’t even merit thought—Khun takes thirty seconds to do the mental math, another minute to get his contingency plans in order, and then climbs out of his lighthouse.

“Fall back,” he says. The team needs to appear to be on the cusp of defeat enough for the 2nd Squadron to let its guard down, to believe that his “capture” is real. It won’t require much acting—Hatz is bleeding heavily from one arm. Rak has been knocked somewhere so far Khun can’t even hear him anymore. Even Bam looks exhausted—favoring his left side, gasping for breath, his blood a harsh line down his face.

Khun bites back a familiar frustration. Even now—especially now—the hardest battles are fought by Bam. Without Bam here, they would’ve all been captured or killed ages ago. Bam, who avoids violence when he can, who hates being powered by the thousands of souls taking residence in his body.

And so—Bam shouldn’t be the one to do this. He can’t be. And Khun did not come this far to be carried.

What good is a schemer who can’t execute on his own schemes?

“Fall back,” he repeats firmly, when some of them are slow on the uptake, “but make it convincing.”

He summons the fire fish from his hand and allows it to burn a path for him. Rankers, at first bewildered and disdainful, stagger back in horror when they realize what he’s doing. He watches as they fall one after the other, screaming and writhing and burning alive, lighting Khun’s way forward like street lamps, or fireflies.

Come for me, he thinks, as he forces his way through. Leave my team alone. Leave Bam alone.

“Khun what the fuck are you doing,” Shibisu says in one breath, furious and terrified, but Khun doesn’t have time to yell back, doesn’t have time to explain, doesn’t have time for anything until—

From the corner of his eye, a figure hurtles towards him, mowing down Rankers like grass. 

“Now what’s he doing?” Shibisu sounds hysterical. “Both of you, get back here!”

Bam. That’s Bam, screaming his name, yelling at him to stop, and for a moment Khun almost does, but—but the Rankers look quietly afraid now, all listening intently to someone speak. More instructions, coming from the commander in the warship. Khun has to get there in time, or none of them will make it out of here.

But Bam keeps going, making his way towards Khun and the warship with alarming speed, and Khun would laugh at this ridiculous race if he weren’t already livid, out of his mind with fear and yelling at him to stop, Bam, stop —

And then, the person on the warship must make their decision, because all the Rankers seem to come to the same conclusion simultaneously—

Capture the Khun boy first. Save the Irregular for after.

All of them direct themselves to Khun at once, charging him from all sides, and Khun braces himself and stands his ground, lets the fire fish loom over them like an angry red storm—

— and then watches in horror as Bam, suddenly blank-faced and staring at nothing, ignites all three Thorn fragments in one go.

There is a moment of quiet before everything goes to shit—an anticipatory kind of silence, like a bated breath. It passes in slow motion, and it’s like Khun can see everything happen at once—Endorsi whirling around in alarm, the hem of her dress fluttering in the breeze, a premonition to the storm. Shibisu, opening his mouth to shout a warning. Ran, mid-leap and sparking with shinsu, losing his balance and tripping in surprise, shifting his focus from the Ranker in front of him to Bam a few yards ahead. Bam, standing deadly still while power swirls around him, invisible and vicious, the eye of a storm. 

“What are you—” Khun manages to choke out, before the world is enveloped in white and sound is lost.

The world doesn’t burn. It vaporizes.

The ensuing light is painful to look at—too bright for his eyes. It drowns Bam, and for an awful moment he looks more god than human, looks like he’s simmering at the seams. 

Khun doesn’t have time to think, can only close his eyes against the onslaught. But even in the onslaught, he knows. He has seen Bam this way only once before—that day at the Hell Train Station, Rachel appearing like a nightmare that Bam was refusing to wake up from. Bam had sleepwalked his way through that whole encounter, but Khun remembers it perfectly—Bam’s face cast in shadow, Khun’s own outrage that Rachel would leave him this way, before he’d truly understood the depth of her motivations, of her selfishness. 

Then—then the air had changed, and the world had dissolved into black and red, pure energy blazing from Bam’s back like a sword he’d been impaled on, like a butterfly wing torn in half, running on the force of its anger alone. And then Bam had leapt up and punched Ha Yura straight into the ground. The earth had parted itself at his touch. And when Bam looked back up—

—black and red—

—and gold, and gold, and gold. Shadows and gold. More hunter than human. That had been the depth of his desperation. 

And then Khun had figured out what the red thing sprouting from Bam’s back really was. Not a ripped wing, not an impaled sword, but a puppet string—and Bam, at its end, a marionette to his own loneliness.

So it’s fitting, somewhat, that as Bam’s power grows, the number of puppet strings increases. He’s up to three now, three red things threaded through his body, well on his way to a fourth, and Khun watches in fear and frustration as they make him dance, as they make him set the world ablaze.

“What is he doing?” someone screams.

Fall back, Khun thinks, but he can’t get the words out. 

Not: Fall back, or you will die.

But: Fall back, or Bam will kill you.

The team catches on. They get the fuck out there, run for their own warship, but it’s too late—not even Endorsi on Bong Bong can escape the blaze. It is spreading too far, too fast, and by the time Shibisu has run through the calculations, by the time Khun has barked his orders, their voices are already drowning in white. 

From the corner of his eye, Khun can see the enemy warship burst into flames. That’s one way to solve the command center problem, he thinks wryly, but even his inner monologue is colored with alarm. He stamps it down before it can veer into hysteria. There’s no time for that.

And that’s all the mental processing he manages before he has to turn away from the glare. His thoughts are already shutting down, his body directing its energy away from his brain and into instinctual survival, curling into itself against the force of Bam’s power. At this point, their only hope is that Bam’s shinsu will know to discriminate, to separate friend from foe—and that there will be something left of Bam to piece together afterwards. He aches at the thought.

Screams, chaos, things breaking and crashing into each other and breaking again. Loud, loud, loud.

Then—silence again. But not the silence of anticipation—this is the silence of absence. 

Khun slowly lowers his arm from where it was protecting his face.

He coughs, then immediately regrets it, and ends up with a lungful of smoke. There’s dust and rubble as far as the eye can see—ash falls from the sky like snow, backlit by destruction, and the sky itself is a disturbing orange-yellow, completely blocked off by debris. Almost no sunlight filters through at all.

He tries feeling his way around (“Ow!” someone yelps—sounds like Shibisu) but his balance is off. His head is ringing, his vision is blurred, and he can’t hear very well from his left—the explosion must have damaged his ear. He’s not so much walking as he is stumbling, but eventually he fumbles his way to the front of the warship—or, where the warship used to be.

There is the outline of a person, a shadowy figure shrouded in smoke, and Khun’s heart sinks. No surprise, only a cold, heavy certainty—the confirmation of an unacknowledged suspicion. 

“Bam,” he rasps.

Bam turns around to face him. He stands tall and strong, still aglow with the effects of his shinsu. Khun is about to pass out where he stands. To call it a power difference is a joke—forget not being in the same ballpark. Khun doesn’t think they’re even in the same ontology anymore.

Beneath all the guilt—that Bam has burned souls, that Bam has killed, that Bam has done something he will regret because of Khun —is a quiet resignation. Truth be told, this is a long time coming. He has thought of this so often that it feels more like a memory than an anticipation; he remembers it more than he startles at it. It is the feeling of a nightmare coming home. It sinks into him like a sigh.

Loneliness. In Bam, it is a force to be contained, a wildfire that razes. In Khun, it is this: a cold fog, murky and opaque, that settles over his existence. It is the knowledge of its inevitability—that people exist to leave and be left.

There is no such thing as conquering loneliness in the tower. The survival of loneliness is only the delaying of its effect, ignoring the hurt in favor of kicking it further down the road for his future self to confront. Loneliness is not something to eliminate, only something to be outlived by—and so, by extension, it is impossible to stop someone from leaving. It is only possible to preclude being left, by leaving them first. 

Khun has known this for a long time, and so he recognizes the signs of it now.

Bam—backlit by chaos and embers, a chaos of his own making.

This is what it looks like, Khun thinks. This is how it starts. 

They part ways with White and the others as soon as they make it back onto the ship. Hockney gapes at the state they’re in. Khun has overused the firefish, and so none of them are healed—Endorsi limps to a chair on her broken ankle, and the rest of them are covered in various cuts and bruises. Bam is sporting a particularly nice head wound. Khun is so feverish that he’s burning up. They’re not in any condition to face another ambush. 

Hwaryun takes one look at them and folds her arms. “Go to the 113th floor,” she says, “and hide there until I say so. Jahad’s Army can’t reach you there.” 

Bam looks at her. She’s taking White and Hockney with her, which isn’t a terrible idea. Bam wants to keep Hockney as far away from danger as possible, and White as far from himself as possible, but— “Why aren’t you coming with us?” he asks uncertainly. 

 “This is the path you have to take,” Hwaryun tells him. She gestures at his group—Rak, Shibisu, Endorsi, Anak, Ran. Khun. Their original team from the test floor, he notices, plus Khun’s family. “It needs to be you. Take care of your friends, Viole.” She smiles at him in that special way of hers—teetering on a smirk, just on the verge of being smug. “Don’t die before we fetch you.” 

He scowls at her, but then she adds, “Take the time to cool down.” 

Bam’s face heats up, mostly in shame. An awkward silence falls over them, no one saying what Bam is thinking— 

He could’ve killed them. He almost did.

Even in the context of everything else he’s done, none of them had known he had this kind of power—power enough to vaporize an entire battlefield in a hair trigger temper, blink an entire army in and out of existence. 

Bam hadn’t even known he could do that, and he still doesn’t remember how he did it—only remembers the blankness, the black feeling, the tidal feeling of something rising and falling, leaving wreckage in its wake. He doesn’t know how to do it again. He doesn’t know how to stop it if he does do it again. He doesn’t know, and it terrifies him.

He sneaks a glance at Khun. Khun isn’t looking at him.

That terrifies him too.

Hwaryun’s expression softens, like she knows. And she’s Hwaryun, so she probably does. She looks like she might say something else, but then turns to Shibisu. “You have a question,” she says, and Bam feels his shoulders relax, relieved to have her attention off him.

Shibisu looks slightly creeped out, but plows ahead. “Uh, yeah. Before you go… the 113th floor—what is it?”

She smile-smirks again. And explains.

No one smiles back.

The journey to the 113th floor is deathly quiet.

“Nightmare Floor, huh,” Endorsi finally says, inspecting her nails. She has her right ankle propped up on a table, swollen and wrapped up and iced. “Sounds dramatic. How bad can it be?”

“Pretty bad,” Shibisu mutters. He winces as he rolls his shoulder back in a tentative stretch. “It’s called the Nightmare Floor.”

“Perhaps the naming is metaphorical,” Hatz says, considering.

“And that’s better?”  

“What’s the point of wondering?” Anak says lazily. “We don’t have anything to go on. The witch didn’t tell us anything.”

“She couldn’t,” Khun points out. “It’s like the Hidden Floor. You can’t talk about it. But she told us enough.”

“Yeah, that we have to stay on a floor that’s gonna try to kill us and we can’t even fight back? Sounds great. Doesn’t sound bad at all.” Shibisu sounds mildly hysterical.

There is no violence allowed on the floor, she’d said. On your part, anyway. But for each night you stay on the 113th floor, the floor itself will come alive and attempt to kill you.

Strategically, it makes perfect sense. Jahad’s Army can’t come fight them on the 113th floor, since violence is forbidden on the floor. As long as they stay on that floor, they’re untouchable—until Hwaryun sends word, and has collected the necessary reinforcements from FUG for them to leave safely.

But the name Nightmare Floor does not lend itself easily to comfort.

Bam looks down. This is his fault. Jahad’s Army wouldn’t have ambushed them if not for him. They wouldn’t have to go hide on some haunted living murder-floor if not for him. This is his fault. His fault for getting them into this war with Jahad, his fault for then blowing up the entire battlefield. His fault for nearly getting them killed.

Take the time to cool down. 

How can he, when he doesn’t understand what set him off in the first place?

In moments like these, he hates this power, vicious and tempestuous. In moments like these, he truly does feel more weapon than human—just an ignition weapon, just another thing to be wielded, like the Black March and Green April. Just another weapon that drives its wielder mad. 

“Sorry,” he hears himself say.

The team quiets. 

Then, too-loud laughter. Shibisu strides over and slaps him on the back. “What are you talking about,” he says cheerily. It’s a brittle sound, breakable at a touch. “Sorry for getting us out of there alive?” 

Endorsi limps over to him too, and crosses her arms, looks at him sternly. “Don’t think so lowly of us,” she tells him. “Okay?”

She makes eye contact with him, holds it steady. And—that should help, but Bam recognizes it for what it is. Look how unafraid I am, she seems to say, but only an afraid person would think to say those words in the first place. Bam knows. He’s very familiar with fear.

Endorsi, brave and strong. Bam cycles through guilt, then frustration, then guilt again. You should be afraid, he imagines telling her. I am. I’m the reason your ankle is injured in the first place.

Instead, he tears his gaze away, looks at his feet and says, “Okay.” 

And then Khun says, “We should be the ones apologizing.” 

Bam looks up. Khun’s mouth is twisted unhappily, and he’s not looking at him. “What?”

“We should be the ones apologizing,” Khun repeats, “for not being able to do more. It’s a failure on our part that you had to do what you did in the first place.” He says the words very matter-of-factly, the way someone might recite pages from an encyclopedia. “It’s a failure on mine.” 

There is so much wrong with that sentence that Bam doesn’t know where to start. And then all he hears is— 

Fall back. Forget about me. 

Shibisu grins awkwardly and slings an arm over Khun’s shoulder. “Alright, that’s enough. No one’s apologizing to anyone else, okay? We’re all alive and happy and we’re going to go bond on the Nightmare Floor. It sounds cozy. Just dandy. It’s gonna be great.”

“Khun,” Bam starts. 

Khun shrugs off Shibisu’s arm. “I’m going to go do some research on this floor,” he says stiffly, and strides away.

“Wait!” Bam hears himself say, for the second time in as many hours.

Fire, technicolor, anchored in fear. The world, breaking into pieces. He is always being left behind. 

Bam runs after him.

Khun is halfway to his room when a hand clasps around his arm. Bam, breathless, at his shoulder. “What were you going to do?” Bam asks.

Khun stops mid-stride and turns around. “What?”

“What were you going to do,” Bam repeats, “before everything…” He swallows. “Blew up.”

Ah. This conversation. 

“I was going to break into their warship.”

“How?”

“Either break in, or let myself be captured,” Khun says tonelessly. “Whichever happened first.” 

It happens so quickly that Khun doesn’t realize what’s happening until his back has already hit the wall. Bam’s hands dig into his shoulders like he’s worried Khun will slip away if he lets go. “Why would you do that?” he asks. His voice is tight. Taut. “Why didn’t you tell us? We could’ve—I could’ve—”

“We didn’t have time. I weighed the options and this was the most efficient one.”

“But—”

“That’s my job, Bam. Do you not trust me to do it?”

“Your job is not to walk into a crowd of Rankers and die,” Bam hisses. “How can you say that? What about the rest of us? Didn’t you think we could help? Walking in there alone and—” Bam cuts off, like he can’t finish the sentence. His hands are shaking. Khun feels his shoulders tremble with them. “What about us?”

He’d thought about that question, once, the night they’d finally gotten Bam back. Endorsi had asked it, once.

They were all slumped around the resort, huddled over themselves, basking in their own exhaustion. And then she had said, “Why didn’t you say something? We could’ve helped. What about us? Did you forget about us?”

A nonsensical question. They had the facts—FUG and Hansung Yu and the rest of them. They had the facts, and somehow, still, none of them understood, because at the end of the day, it came down to this: a boy had been sacrificed, traded for a god, turned into a stranger, and none of them knew why. 

But Khun understood, a little. Understood that people only wanted something to believe in—some sort of a priori truth, only explicable in terms of itself, like a snake eating its own tail.

He thought of all the people he knew, vying for godhood. His father, prayed to by a cult of his children, lazy and complacent on his throne. FUG, elevating Bam to godhood where they themselves fell short, dropping the weight of that on someone else. Jahad, who only spoke through his followers, whose “daughters” were just glorified missionaries, peddling in blood.

That was all that existed, in the world of a zealot—gods and believers. Gods and themselves, a kind of two-man solipsism.

What about us? 

Nothing, he knew. There wasn’t room for anyone else. 

Bam’s hands grip his shoulders, his fingernails digging into Khun’s skin like roots looking for purchase. But that won’t do. He won’t find his grounding there.

“What about you?” Khun asks bluntly.

Bam stares a moment longer, unmoving, like there must be a lie in there somewhere, and he will find it if only he looks hard enough—but then he finds nothing, comes up blank, and slowly loosens his grip. But even then, there is something searching in his expression, and the feeling of it unsettles Khun enough that he adds, “Or is it that you didn’t think I could pull it off?”

He means to say it lightly, but does not quite manage to soften the edge of it. Bam actually flinches. “ No,”  he says emphatically, bewildered. “Of course not. I just—” But he comes up short again, unable to finish the sentence. 

“Then there’s no problem, is there?” Khun removes Bam’s hands from his shoulders, smiles to take away the sting. From the look on Bam’s face, it doesn’t work. “I’m going to go lie down and give the fire fish time to power back up.” He looks at Bam’s head wound, still smeared with traces of blood, and clenches his fist. He can’t even heal it. “You should get ready, too.” 

“But...”

Khun leaves.

When they arrive on the 113th floor, it is evening. This is absurd, because according to Bam’s pocket, it should be two in the afternoon. But the skies are dark when he steps out of the warship, a deep navy. “What the fuck,” Shibisu says succinctly. 

The air is chilly, and Bam feels the cold like the drag of a finger along his spine, reaching under his clothes and creeping over his skin. But it’s more than just the chill. He can’t shake the feeling, as soon as he lands, that something is watching them.

A breeze sweeps itself over his body. It whispers through the sleeves of his jacket, runs its fingers through his hair. He feels it like an icy sigh.

He shivers, and folds his arms over his chest.

The ground is cobblestone and grass, tall and untamed, and they tickle his ankles like small, cold spiders. Everything smells faintly of rain. Bam thinks he can hear the sound of waves somewhere in the background, but it’s too dark to see clearly. He can barely see his friends as they step off the ship, one by one. 

The only light comes in the form of fireflies, flickering dimly in a perfectly straight and unmoving line that starts at the warship. An image flashes to his mind immediately—of Khun, setting Rankers on fire as they lit his path to—to— 

He hurriedly shuts down the thought.

The line of fireflies ends at a large, imposing manor. It must hold at least fifty rooms. Vines scale the walls relentlessly from all sides, like the earth itself is trying to claw the manor back down to the underworld. The roots spread and sprawl like long, delicate fingers—a finger hooked under that windowsill, a hand clasped around that chimney, a nail digging into that crack in the wall. In the breeze, the leaves on the vines rustle, swaying back and forth, and Bam can’t shake the feeling of being waved at—of being greeted.

Shadows ghost the windows of the manor. They shouldn’t be noticeable, given the darkness of this floor, but somehow they are—certain spots darker than others, twisting and switching places with each other like sun spots in his vision, swishing away as soon as he tries to look at them.

“Can’t we just stay on the warship?” Shibisu asks plaintively. Bam privately agrees. 

Anak shoves him forward. “Keep moving.”

“I’m just saying, maybe we shouldn’t walk into the creepy haunted house, if we know the floor is trying to kill us.”

“We have no other choice,” Hatz says solemnly. “Danger must be confronted directly.” 

Shibisu gives him an incredulous look. “Excuse me? I beg to differ. Strong proponent of running and hiding, here. You’re a scout, Hatz, what are you even talking about?”

“Do you ever shut up,” Ran mutters.

Shibisu ignores him. “How do you think it’ll kill us?” he whispers. “I hope it’s quick. I’m not great with pain. Fuck, now I’m wondering why it’s called the Nightmare Floor again.”

They reach the gates, and Bam reaches for the latch— 

—but then the gates creak open on their own. He jolts back. The metal hinges are rusty, and they give a tortured groan as they twist in place to allow Bam passage. The sound is scarily human.

Even Rak looks a little spooked.

The manor is pitch-black as they make their way past the gates. If not for the shadows in the windows, it would look abandoned. But the moment they reach the front door, all the lights in the manor appear to turn on at once. 

The windows illuminate like candles, flickering unevenly in a deep orange hue. All the windows light up simultaneously, and Bam blinks rapidly to adjust to the sudden change in light. His shadow stretches behind him like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, stretches behind him like a yawn. Absurdly, he is suspicious that it is moving without his permission. 

And then there’s the sound of voices.

It starts off low, quiet, a trick of the mind. But then, slowly and surely, it grows—laughter, light and coy. A hundred voices all at once, whispering and giggling, a sudden backdrop of chatter where there had been none. None of the voices are discernible, and they blend together into one eerie chorus.  The manor seems to switch on like an old television, staticky and weak at first, and then increasingly vibrant, vibrant, loud.

“Nightmare Floor,” Bam repeats weakly. “Right.” 

Rak is unimpressed. “These cheap tricks don’t fool me.” His voice is a deep, gravelly roar, like he means to shout the manor into submission. “Give me something I can fight.”

As if in response, the manor door swings open. All the whispering and giggling fall silent at once, and a hush drapes itself over the manor, like its inhabitants have been told to quiet down. “Careful what you wish for,” Khun says.

They wait for a few tense moments.

But nothing jumps out at them—nothing happens. 

So Bam steels himself, and steps inside. 

“Bam,” Endorsi hisses, but the rest of them follow too, either unwilling to let him walk into the manor alone, or unwilling to wait outside without him.

He’s not sure what they expect, but it’s not this—a single long corridor with hardwood floors, a dark mahogany, overlaid in a deep maroon carpet. The hallway is completely barren. There are no staircases leading elsewhere, no windows. The walls are the same dark mahogany, undecorated—but the rings in the wood panels are oddly shaped, too odd to be natural. He blinks and tries to take a closer look, and finds that the designs have changed. 

His eyes are playing tricks on him, he decides, and tries not to think too hard about it. 

The hallway leads to a single set of double doors, at the very end. Bam is too far away to discern, but the doors look wooden, heavy, and intricately carved. 

“Absurd,” Hatz says. 

Anak lifts her chin in agreement. “The manor can’t just be this hallway and a single room.”

“But there are no other doors,” Endorsi points out, eyes narrowed. “And where did all the voices go?”

They fall into an awkward silence.

Then Ran sighs. “Does it matter?” he says bluntly. He looks extremely disinterested. “The manor wants us in that room, and there’s nowhere else to go.” Without turning at all, he slides his eyes over to Khun, low-lidded and sharp. “A.A.”

Unspoken, but clear—the final decision goes to Khun.   

Khun’s expression is unreadable. “Ran’s right,” he says. He stands hipshot, one hand in his pocket, looking for all the world like this is just another Tuesday. If Khun is at all unsettled, he’s not showing it. Like Ran, he would almost look bored, if not for the slight edge in the uptick of his mouth, tense and taut. “Let’s go.” 

The rest of the team gawks at them for a second—these two, blue-haired, blase-sounding Khuns, sharp-eyed and otherwise completely expressionless. But they’re right—there’s nothing else to do, and so Bam follows along, tension a spider weaving webs along his spine.

The double doors are even more impressive up close. Bam realizes he recognizes some of the designs carved into the wood. There are fire motifs everywhere—figures partially swallowed in flames, fire lining the edges of the panes, fire, fire, fire. There is a person surrounded by the burning figures, something amorphous hovering near him, but the carvings look only half-formed. Intricately detailed in parts, strangely fuzzy and worn in others. Like someone carved them from a dream.

Bam shivers. The pictures unsettle him, and he squints harder, tries to pick apart the feeling, but then Khun pushes the door open. It gives in to his touch like a sigh.

There is the smell of—dust, and old books, and candlelight. There is the feeling of being watched, by a hundred pairs of eyes. There is so much, and yet—  

—there’s nothing. Nothing but a giant room. It is ornately decorated—a sparkling chandelier hangs from the ceiling. The windows are gilded with gold, and the walls are beautifully patterned, but otherwise, the room is just a room—dimly lit, and completely, bizarrely devoid of furniture. Just four walls and a hardwood floor. Not even a rug.

But then Bam spots the seven privacy panels near the far wall.

“One for each of us,” Endorsi drawls, and makes her way over to them. “So thoughtful.”

Bam and Hatz exchange a glance as they follow. Hatz speaks first. “This is suspicious,” he says. “The manor is trying to separate us.”

“The manor doesn’t want you to see me naked.” Endorsi arches an eyebrow and smirks. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Hatz does not have a problem with that. Hatz flushes bright pink even as he sputters, and Endorsi cackles as he whirls around and marches behind the nearest privacy screen. Bam stifles a laugh into his hand.

Then Hatz makes a surprised noise. “There are clothes,” he says.

Endorsi perks up. “Oh?”

He’s right—Bam peeks behind a privacy screen and finds a black tuxedo hanging from the wall, along with a white vest and collared shirt. A pair of shoes, black leather and polished to a glean, sitting beneath them. Various accoutrements and accessories, neatly set aside on a stool. There is gold trim on the seams of a white bowtie. 

He stares at the clothes, baffled. “We… we wear these, right?” he asks slowly, and gets a snort from Endorsi.

He puts on the collared shirt and trousers first. To his surprise and suspicion, they fit perfectly. The silk feels cool against his skin, feels like a caresse, feels alive, and he is suddenly not very sure that this is a good idea. 

“I—” he starts, but then he hears Rak bulldoze his way back out from behind his screen, apparently fully dressed. 

“Hurry up, turtles,” he rumbles. “Why are you turtles so sl—” 

And then he cuts off. 

“...Rak?” Bam calls tentatively, still struggling with the buttons on his vest. Why are there so many layers? “Are you okay?”

“Get out here. I don’t like this,” Rak mutters.

“What?” Endorsi calls. “Don’t like what?” She rounds the privacy screens next, and Bam listens apprehensively as she cuts off too, in a sharp inhale of breath. “Oh. Hello.”

Anxious, Bam makes a mess of the bowtie around his neck, definitely crooked, and hurries out from behind the privacy screen too, left arm still fumbling for the sleeve of his tuxedo jacket. 

And then he stops.

Where the room had been completely empty, it is now filled with—everything. 

Tall, round tables draped in white cloth, topped with food and candles. Waiters and waitresses, walking around with silver trays, serving flutes of champagne. A small string orchestra in the corner. Everything is strangely muted, but then Bam slips on the tuxedo jacket properly, slack-jawed, and it’s like someone switches on the sound. Suddenly there is light conversation, the delicate sound of glass touching glass, the faint strains of an eerie violin in the background. It is the sound of smoke and dark velvet.

“What is this,” Bam hears himself say, and jolts when a hand lightly touches his arm. He swivels around, tearing his eyes away from the orchestra, and sees Khun at his shoulder dressed in midnight blue, so dark as to appear black. His bowtie is the color of a deep sea, and it pairs with his earrings just so.

They are in what is probably a haunted mansion, and based on what Hwaryun said, this mansion is probably going to try to kill them—but even so, Bam finds himself staring for a moment, reminded that formalwear and bowties are not foreign to Khun the way they are to everyone else. It’s apparent in the way he carries himself—he walks as naturally in a tux as he does in basketball shorts; only the cadence of his walk is different, somehow. Lyrical in a way that Bam is not used to. 

But then he catches himself, involuntarily reminded of the events of the day, hanging between them like an anvil.

Fall back. Forget about me. 

What else is there?

Khun clears his throat and looks away, to Bam’s disappointment. But then he gestures at the room. “You know what this is,” he says. “Take a closer look.”

So Bam does, lets his eyes sweep across the room, and tries to reassess.

It’s a party, in full swing. There are nearly a hundred people, all dressed in gowns or dark tuxes, bathed in shadows and dim, flickering candlelight. Some of them cluster against the walls, talking and laughing and clinking glasses with each other. Others dance in the center of the room in long, gliding movements, always in pairs. There is a distinct three-beat count to their steps, in tempo with the music in the background—that dark, sweeping sound. That shadowy croon.

And then he realizes two things. 

First, they are in a ballroom. This is a ball. 

Second, the double doors—and their only exit—have vanished.

Chapter Text

This is not Khun’s first ball. This probably does not even make the first hundred. And so he recognizes it for what it is instantly—the light, mindless chatter, more background noise than conversation. The fizzle of champagne in tiny flutes, the gentle burn of it on the tongue. The tuxedo. He’d known as soon as he saw the tuxedo, neatly hung for him behind the privacy screen.

It is almost an exact replica of the tuxedo he’d worn to his last family ball, the opening night of the princess competition years ago. Most of that night is a blur now, but he recalls this in absolute clarity: The whisper of Maria’s voice as she’d approached him. The shimmer of her gown, silver and blue, like she had draped herself in rainwater and frost. 

Aguero, she’d said. My Aguero. 

Children of the Khun Family were taught to dance from an early age, raised in galas and balls and cocktail parties, in shimmering gowns and dark suits. Every competition, every death match was prefaced with a ball. It was one of the things that came with being a member of the Ten Families. A tax paid for the privilege of expensive shoes and bespoke clothes—in exchange, members were expected to step in line, step on beat, dance in the center of a ballroom for all to see. The subject of careful scrutiny in a ballroom of wolves, watching hungrily for the moment you stumble.

The tango was the official dance of the family. Sharp, punctuated staccato smoothed with mournfully velvet croons, a cat-and-mouse sort of dance. Look how well I hunt and hide. It was the first dance the Khun children learned, and it was unchangingly the opening number of any ball, any gala. The first dance was always a tango, a show of power, and the opening ball of the princess competition was no exception. Tango, then murder.

The night was a precursor to a month of bloodshed, a ball for the young women of the family to make their debut as candidates for murder. They held themselves poised and proud, draped in silk and satin, velvet and chiffon, as many shades of blue as the sea. The quickness of their steps and lingering drag of their heels spoke of many hours in front of the mirror, enhancing the beauty of their movements to the point of devastation.

In a few short months, half of them would be dead.

Khun watched them tango and felt nothing.

His sister, Agnis, danced among them, smooth and quick as water. Beside Khun, Kiseia’s eyes followed her admiringly, like a sapling angling for sunlight. 

Don’t, Khun wanted to tell her. Don’t love someone who will leave you. 

Agnis was just another face in a sea of faces. But she was in his corner of the sea—or rather, he was in hers. And so he’d help her, he’d step on tempo, stay in his box, one two three. He’d help her and she’d leave Kiseia, and leave him. That was what they were supposed to aspire to. That was what it meant to be a son of Khun—to help people leave.

So many ruthless people, trying so hard. Wanting so badly. Badly enough to kill. Badly enough to die.

But then there was Maria.

Maria did not participate in the opening dance. She rocked back on her heels and watched, serene, as her competition tangoed in front of her on the dance floor. She waited, waited, waited until the orchestra started playing a waltz.

And then she walked right up to Khun, in her dress of rainwater and frost. She smiled, and she asked if he would dance with her. 

There was something special about Maria’s waltz. It was airy, free-form and light, floating where everyone else was merely gliding. Unconstrained and unpracticed—or, perhaps, so practiced as to give the impression of inimitable naturalness. The effect was the same. 

Dancing with her was the difference between counting box-steps and walking on air. She took his hand, and they waltzed, and her steps were so fairy-light, so ephemeral, that he half-worried she would waltz into nothingness.

Wouldn’t it be nice, he had thought, if it were her? Wouldn’t that be nice to believe in?

Aguero, my Aguero.

“Khun?”

Khun blinks back into the present at Bam’s voice. “Yes?”

Bam peers back at him curiously. “Are you okay? You were… pretty far away.”

Loneliness, a force that razes.

“Just thinking,” Khun says, and brushes off Bam’s follow-up question about things that don’t matter, because, “You’re right. The door is gone.” But that’s not all.

There’s a grandfather clock in a corner of the ballroom, unobtrusive and hidden by shadows. It is tall and piano-black, polished and gleaming. The hands point almost exactly at midnight, even though this is absurd—his pocket very clearly states that it is barely late afternoon. 

He stares at it pensively. Hypotheses race in his mind like sparrows, zipping past and forth, vying for his attention. He swats some down, lets others hover. So many possibilities, but impossible to narrow them down without more information. Reluctantly, he tears his gaze away from the clock to observe the party at large. 

The music lingers at a gentle waltz, as faceless strangers glide around the dance floor. Revelers hang back, leaning against the walls, laughing amongst themselves, sipping champagne, enjoying the dancing, but always—always watching the grandfather clock. A flicker there, a side-glance there. Watching, waiting for something. 

Hatz helps himself to more wine. Endorsi takes a walk around the ballroom. Ran and Anak bicker over something. Rak finds the canapes. Bam fidgets with the collar of his shirt. 

Khun waits.

Fifteen minutes pass on the grandfather clock without incident. And then, something changes. 

Abruptly, the couples standing on the dance floor cut their dances short, bow and curtsy to each other, and part ways. No one else approaches the dance area to take their place. 

In synchrony, the clock stops, hands stilling.

“Strange,” Rak says, over a mouthful of snacks. “Why have the turtles ceased dancing?”

The music melts away from the waltz beat into something more like elevator music—pleasant and light, and otherwise unmemorable. Nothing remarkable about it in particular.

The revelers have stopped watching the clock. They are now unabashedly staring at Khun’s group, even over their unfaltering chatter and laughter. There is no halt in the flow of conversation, no stutter, but like the gentle pull of a magnet, their gazes pivot slowly to Khun and the team and stay there, anticipatory and unblinking.

An hour passes, then two. Nothing changes, except that Rak grows more and more restless. 

Khun eyes the grandfather clock suspiciously.

“You know,” he says slowly, “the clock stopped right when the dancing did.”

Shibisu looks at him sharply. “You don’t think…”

Khun works through the pieces, organizing them in his head like tiles. There is a grandfather clock in the corner, and it had worked until it didn’t. There had been fifteen minutes of dancing, during which all was normal. A show, he realizes, of what things could be. A demonstration. A tutorial.

He sweeps a critical eye over the partygoers, still talking quietly amongst themselves, but—watching them. Watching him. Expectantly waiting for something.

If this evening is a tutorial, then— 

“Khun?” Bam prompts, sounding concerned. “Is everything okay?”

“Let me try something,” he says, and hands his champagne to Bam. “Don’t drink that.”

He pulls away from the team and makes his way over to the crowd of anonymous partygoers, whose eyes follow him faithfully. Hungrily. 

One young woman separates herself from the group and steps up to meet him halfway. She stops a foot in front of him, and smiles expectantly as if to confirm his suspicions.

Shadows from the candlelight flicker over her face, making it hard for Khun to discern any distinguishing features. He gets the impression that this is intentional; that she might not have any distinguishing features at all, more ghost than girl. The long velvet gown she wears drapes over her body like shadow solidified, and it shimmers in the light as she takes his proffered hand.

“What’s he doing?” he hears Anak ask.

It has been years since he’s done this—but it must be built into his muscle memory somehow, because his feet lead him unfalteringly to the center of the ballroom, the girl’s hand light in his. The chatter around the ballroom fades, and a quiet hush falls over their audience. If there had been any pretense of not staring before, it’s gone now; every single reveler bodily turns to face him, as if he is the only person in the room. A hundred pairs of eyes, fixed on him, waiting for him to make a move. 

It’s a nostalgic feeling.

He bows to her, and she curtsies, her gown shifting around her body like a whisper of smoke. The candlelight casts her face in a slight glow when she peeks up at him, and he realizes that, like the waitress, her face is somewhat familiar. He must have seen her somewhere before. He stares at her for a few seconds, trying to place her, but the feeling scuttles away again when he reaches for it. Trying to pick it apart is like trying to grasp water. 

From the corner of his eye, he notices that the clock hands are moving again. 

His body moves of its own accord, and the young woman follows suit, resting one hand in his hand, one hand on his shoulder. A waltz position.

Then the music starts and it, too, is nostalgic.

Wouldn’t it be nice, if it were her? Wouldn’t that be nice to believe in?

The musings of a child.

Aguero. My Aguero. 

This is what Khun believes in: The loss of touch. Dead sisters littering a ballroom, dappled in bruises and blood. Being left. Leaving first.

He derives no satisfaction from this, no relief from being right. It’s Hansung’s test all over again, and at the end of the day, he should have known. This is what it always comes down to—himself and a hundred pairs of eyes, going through the motions of a dance. Stepping on tempo, staying in his box, one two three. He is a son of Khun, and to be a son of Khun is to help people leave. He should have known.

He waltzes and waltzes and waltzes, and he wonders why the music always sounds so mournful.

None of them are used to seeing this—Khun, looking like an aristocrat, taking fluent and fluid steps around a ballroom. Khun, in a dark tuxedo and leather shoes, polished to a gleam. Khun, completely expressionless and touching somebody, resting his hand on her back, dancing with her hand-in-hand. Khun, who hates being touched, who shrugs off Shibisu’s hugs and headpats and neatly dodges out of the way every time Rak comes near. 

Khun, who had reached out to touch Bam’s hair that day on the 52nd floor, and then withdrawn his hand a second later.

Bam had raced down from the ramp across the platform, feet pounding steel. The landing strip had felt endlessly long, and Khun hadn’t run to meet him halfway—but that was okay, he’d thought. Even Khun’s not running had felt reassuring, in a strange way. Familiar, maybe. Khun didn’t do things like run up to embrace people, and so Bam was content to do the running, content to cross that distance for the both of them. 

“Your hair’s sure grown a lot,” Khun observed, carefully calm, strangely flat. Bam had been bursting with questions, his heart lit up like a firework, but Khun had been—quiet, cool, reserved. His smile had been close-mouthed. Bam felt his own excitement take pause, freeze up in confusion.

But then Khun had reached over, a tentative hand reaching out to tuck Bam’s hair behind his ear, and Bam had shoved aside that confusion in favor of relief at their reunion. 

Anxious to keep the conversation going, Bam added earnestly, “It’s still not as long as I’d like.” 

And that—that had been the wrong thing to say, because Khun had stiffened where he stood, his hand freezing mid-reach.

The inch of space between Bam’s hair and Khun’s hand had felt cavernous. Yawningly chasmic.

And so it’s weird now, seeing Khun hold this complete stranger so close, so naturally, as they dance. Khun and a stranger in this strange embrace. It's a weird, uneasy feeling.

Then, at the half hour mark, the music changes. 

It transforms into something a little quicker, a little fierier. This new sound makes Bam think of red things, things that sparkle and sting, things that are hot to the touch. It is fiercer than the waltz that came before it. There is a stronger beat to it. The instruments seem to have changed, too. When did that happen?

Bam looks to the team for guidance, curious about this change in music, but everyone else seems equally confused—everyone except for Ran, who looks for all the world like it’s just another Tuesday. 

“Samba,” he says tonelessly.

Bam has no idea what he’s talking about, but Endorsi hums in recognition. “You’re right. Impressive.” She smirks. “Guess it’s true what they say about Khuns.”

Khun stumbles for a moment at the sudden rhythm change, and glances at the clock briefly when he does—but then he relaxes into it. He is no longer gliding around the room like air. His movements go from quiet and floating to weighted, aggressive. His back, which had been almost perfectly straight during the waltz, now arches and curves in-pace with the music. It looks much more like the music videos Team Sweet and Sour used to like watching, back on the 20th floor. 

The steps he takes, knee bent and hip cocked and back arched—each step is like a lightning strike. But the movement of his hips is sinuous and smooth, and the combination of it is dizzying. The girl twists with him, dances around him like a spire of smoke, like she means to wrap around him entirely.

Bam watches the way Khun’s hand slides down along the girl’s back, coming to rest at her waist. Still cold, expressionless. Still touching. The uneasy feeling is impossible to place.

After a few minutes of this, the music shifts again. And this time, Ran says, “Salsa.” 

Another shift. “Bachata.”

Another shift. “Foxtrot.”

And then—

Bam doesn’t know much about ballroom dancing, but he’s always imagined ballroom dances to be quiet and subtle, the smooth glide of steps to faint strains of music. Like the waltz. 

This is not that. The music takes on a plaintive air. The beat changes again. The violins come back, fierce and longing. Dark. An angry kind of sad.

And Khun’s steps change again, really come to life, and Bam feels his heart jump out of his chest, because at a swell in the music, in one smooth tug, Khun has pulled the girl into a close embrace.

“Tango,” Ran says.

Their bodies press against each other as they move, like there are magnets pulling them together. The smoke-girl hides her face against his shoulder, tucks it into the crook of his neck. She wraps her arm around his back and holds him close to her, and Khun lets her, stepping smoothly all the while.  He’s never seen Khun hug any—

No. That’s not right. There was that moment on the 52nd floor, outside the Nest. 

But that had been— 

Well. It had been.

It doesn’t matter. Watching them dance now—there is something wrong about it, and Bam stares and stares, trying to place the feeling.

He doesn’t have to look to guess that the rest of the team is gawking, too. To fill the silence, he says awkwardly, “Endorsi, what did you mean earlier? What do they say about Khuns?”

Endorsi is watching the dance with a lightly critical eye. “The Khun Family is known for this style of dance,” she explains, and shrugs. “I mean, all the children from the Families have to learn this stuff. But I’ve seen the Khun princesses at balls before. Yeah, they’re all good at dancing, but this is what they always look most comfortable with. Tango. Samba. Salsa, bachata.” 

Anak makes a face. “It doesn’t suit him at all,” she says. “All that passion and emotion and whatever. Does he even have feelings?”

Shibisu raises his hands placatingly. “Oy, come on, don’t be like that.” 

Bam watches the dance, and quietly disagrees. Khun is intensely private, but— 

He thinks back to the way Khun used to talk about usurping his father. Thinks back to all his arguments with Rak. Thinks back to the hug outside the Nest.

Khun is private. But not unemotional. Not passionless.

Meanwhile, Rak snorts, “Blue Turtle’s family is known for this?  What a useless thing to be known for.”

“Our family is known for every type of dance. Father likes that kind of thing,” Ran mutters. And then, a little lowly, “He brought it from the Outside.”

The Outside. This, then, is Khun’s legacy—a gift from his parents. If Bam’s gift was vengeance and a dark cave, Khun’s gift is this—smooth hip rolls that make Bam’s mouth go dry, quick and slow, weight shifts and curved twists that seem to sweep up and down his body, a loping wave of movement that pushes itself from his hips, up to his shoulders and down to his toes. Quick, quick, slow—like a hurried cursive. Frenzied.

The tango can’t have lasted more than a few minutes, even though it feels impossibly long. But unmistakably, abruptly, the grandfather clock rings once, and then all the music cuts off, as if someone has hit mute on the party. 

The girl slowly, wordlessly peels herself off of Khun.

Then there is the sound of a door opening. Bam turns to face the noise, and realizes in surprise that the double doors are back—and are open.

The girl curtsies to Khun and backs away. Khun stands on the dance floor for a moment longer, staring at the grandfather clock—and then, seemingly satisfied, makes his way back to the group.

Bam rushes forward with the rest of the team to meet him. The uneasy feeling had died down when the dancing ended, but something in its likeness rushes up again now, watching Khun walk towards them. He looks tired. He’s been dancing for almost an hour straight.

“Are you okay?” Bam asks, worried.

Khun waves him off. “That was informative,” he says, and looks at Shibisu expectantly.

Shibisu grins back at him. “I think I’ve figured it out, too.” 

Rak scowls. “Figured what out?”

“The ball,” Endorsi says, casting a narrow-eyed look at the dance floor. Her eyes glint a sharp amber underneath long eyelashes. “The clock only moves when someone’s dancing, and the ballroom doesn’t let us out until the clock goes through a full cycle.” 

“Dancing well,” Khun corrects her. “It penalizes you for bad dancing. The clock stopped for a full minute when I faked a stumble.” 

She smirks at him. “Oh, was that fake?”

“So what’s the plan?” Anak asks, folding her arms.

Khun and Endorsi exchange a look, as the team makes its way out of the ballroom. “There’s still a lot we don’t know,” he says slowly. “We should spend the next 24 hours observing the manor, seeing how it works. But tomorrow night…” 

“We’ll take turns,” Endorsi says. “We’re the only ones who know how to dance. Khun can heal my ankle tomorrow morning, and then tomorrow night we’ll take turns dancing with the ghosts.” She arches an eyebrow. “Unless any of you want to do it?” Bam, absurdly, is about to volunteer, but then Endorsi adds, “Ran?”

“No, thanks,” Ran mutters. “A.A. can do it.” Bam eyes him skeptically.

But Khun doesn’t seem bothered. “That settles it,” he snorts.

No one but princesses and members of the Families would have had the time or inclination to learn to dance. Even Bam, for all of his training with FUG, had never been taught anything like etiquette. For an unthinking moment, Bam finds himself deeply resentful of this fact—Khun and Endorsi, raised and fluent in a world that Bam doesn’t have access to. 

Inexplicably, they suddenly feel very far away.

When they walk out of the ballroom, they find that the landscape of the manor has changed. Where the hallway had once been completely barren, there are now eight doors, the first of which leads into something like a dining area, resplendent with a well-stocked fridge and pantry, and fully functioning kitchen. Each of the remaining seven doors leads into a different bedroom. 

Bam’s room is spacious and comfortable. The bed is pushed up against the window, from which moonlight spills into the room, soft and pale. It is tranquilly quiet, coaxingly dark. Bam can’t find much fault with it.

He also can’t shake the feeling that he’s not alone.

The moon shines on him in a way that feels less soothing and more like a spotlight, a reminder that he is seen. Shadows lurk in the corners, dancing in a way that is not quite natural, that can’t quite be chalked up to the rustle of leaves and wind. Go on, they lilt. Close your eyes. 

Don’t mind us. 

Sleep doesn’t come for a long, long time. Bam’s body seems to reject it every time it visits. He gets the sense that the souls in his body, the many things inhabiting him, are actively trying to fight it off.

But eventually it wrenches him in, seeping deep into his bones. And it takes him in fits.

The dream starts with—nothing. Just pitch blackness, and the feeling of being watched. But there is no sound, no movement. It’s as if the void itself is observing him, spying on him. Bam shrinks into himself, shies away from its gaze.

Relax, something whispers. It is the sound of a thousand voices and one voice and no voices at all, melting into each other like candle wax. It surrounds him on all sides. Open up a little.

His skin parts. His flesh opens. It is not painful—only uncomfortable, vaguely ticklish, like someone has numbed the area and pulled it open for him to see. Bloody, shades of pink and red and bone. His arm splits like a doll’s, unraveled at the seams. 

He should be horrified, should be screaming—but weirdly, his voice is gone, like he’s watching a movie about himself, both in his body and out of it, and somebody else is directing. He’s only here to feel and to watch. 

Then there's the feeling of being prodded—like the invisible voice is reaching a long finger into that hole in his arm, curiously exploring. Rivulets of blood run down his arm and drip down into—pitch black. Nothing.  

What are you hiding, the manor croons. 

An itchy kind of feeling starts in his arm, and then Bam notices a peek of black. Then a second, then a third. Then there’s a whole sea of them—spiders, he realizes, crawling out from under his skin, from that opening in his flesh. Small and black, hundreds of them, thousands, bubbling up from the slit in his skin like ants from an anthill. Wave upon wave of black things, many-legged and climbing over him. They creep under his sleeves, under the collar of his shirt, into his hair. They approach his ear, his eyes. His mouth.

The sensation of them is overwhelming—terror grips him like five icy fingers, squeezing his chest tightly, while an awful tingling sensation covers the rest of his body, feather-light and awful, a million tiny legs scrabbling for purchase on and under his skin.

He claws at them in a panic, but they crawl dexterously through the gaps in his fingers, avoiding his touch. Terrified, he closes his eyes, tries to turn off his sense of sight, but that doesn’t work either—the sight of spiders crawling out from under his skin is replaced by the sensation of spiders crawling out from beneath his eyelids, their legs digging into the cornea of his eye, pushing past the sweep of his eyelashes, anchoring themselves along the bridge of his nose, the curve of his eyebrows. The sensation is curtained by darkness, and without his vision to guide him, his imagination runs wild, filling in the gaps of his senses with a horrible vividness.

Stop, Bam imagines pleading. Stop. 

Then show me, comes the candlewax-voice. And then it morphs into something harder, something distinctly feminine. Its silhouette solidifies at the edges.

Monster, it says, in Rachel’s voice.

Arlene always called you a monster.  

The pitch black reshapes itself into—the cave, under the tower. Dark as far as the eye can see, strange drawings on the wall. Rachel, pinned beneath him, evaporating into gold.

Like a patchwork quilt of all the versions of her he’s known, she mouths at him soundlessly, Monster. 

Rachel fades away, but Bam is the one who’s falling down down down, water cold and unforgiving and seeping into his clothes as he sinks, while Rachel watches him from her wheelchair—standing tall and impassive, her eyes blank.  

He sinks and sinks until he doesn’t, until he lands and his feet touch solid ground—touch the platform of the Hell Train Station. Then he’s running, legs carrying him to her with fierce urgency—Rachel again, in that stupid hood. As if that dumb hood had been enough to fool him the first time around, back on the Test Floor. As if it’s enough now. 

Why why why, his heart beats as the Thorn fragment ignites, bright and blossoming, spilling red into the air like blood.

Electricity sweeps through his body like a wire, shooting up his limbs and through his arm, reaching out through his fingertips, shattering everything in its wake into pieces. He suddenly has the sense that he has lost something tremendous.

She’s in a grey t-shirt now, defiant and bitter and unrepentant still, and the look of it frustrates him more. Someone is now lost to him (who?), because of someone else who is lost to him. His losses have losses. His loneliness compounds.

Why did you do that, he snarls. The words tear out of him like a thunderstorm, send shrapnel and debris into the air with the power of an explosion.

And then it’s this: black sparked with fireworks and frozen chrysanthemums, pulling apart at the seams. The world, existing in pieces. Raining embers and wildfire-fear. Hundreds of pairs of eyes, a cocktail mix of fear and anger staring back at him.

Monster, someone says.

Forget about me, someone says. 

Fear tears through him like gasoline fire, and it sets everything around him aflame.

This is what you do, the manor tells him. This is all you know how to do. 

The world burns and burns and burns.

Bam jolts awake in a cold sweat. 

A few things happen in the morning.

First, Khun tries to heal Endorsi’s ankle with the fire fish, and finds that it does absolutely nothing.

“Is the fire fish turtle broken?” Rak asks.

Khun and Shibisu exchange a look. Shibisu speaks first. “I’d guess it’s part of the floor rules,” he says slowly. “No violence on other people—that probably translates to any kind of shinsu that could affect other people. Even if it’s healing shinsu.”

“I could heal myself this morning,” Khun agrees. “But I can’t use the fire fish on anyone else.” 

Endorsi groans, and leans her head back against the wall. “So I’m stuck like this until we leave? Until Hwaryun comes to fetch us?”

“Stay off your ankle in the meantime,” Shibisu tells her. “Just use Bong Bong.”

“I know that,” she scowls, and looks at Khun. “But what about the ball tonight?” 

Khun shrugs with a nonchalance that Bam doesn’t feel. “It’s just dancing,” he says. “I can do it myself.”

Bam stares at him skeptically from where he sits at the dining table. Khun had looked exhausted last night. Bam believes it—all those sweeping, exact movements. He tries to imagine the amount of work it would take to move his body so precisely, and finds that he can’t. He gets tired just blasting things to indiscriminate pieces.

Monster, a voice whispers in his ear.

He flinches, twisting in alarm to face the voice—but there’s nothing there.

Khun gives him a curious look, but Endorsi cuts in, echoing his thoughts, “You’re going to be super fucking tired.” 

He waves off her comment, disinterested. “We have dances like that every week where I’m from. Right, Ran?”

Ran doesn’t answer. When Bam turns to look at him, he sees that Ran’s gaze is focused on something else in the distance, at the opposite end of the dining area. 

“Small Blue Turtle?” Rak prompts. 

“Ran,” Khun says firmly, and finally Ran tears his eyes away from whatever he was staring at. “What are you looking at?”

The question seems to give Ran pause, but then he mutters, “Nothing. Just seeing things,” and leans sulkily back in his chair, clearly unwilling to elaborate. 

Khun looks exasperated, but Shibisu hums sympathetically. “Can’t blame him,” he says, and yawns. “I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t exactly sleep well. I didn’t think I’d actually have nightmares on the Nightmare Floor. It’s really all in the name, huh?” 

“Last night was pretty creepy,” Endorsi concedes. “I didn’t sleep well either.” The set of her mouth tightens. “I had a dream about my parents.”

“I dreamt about Rachel,” Bam admits, and omits the part about the ambush fire. The Rachel revelation alone draws a wince from Shibisu and dark looks from Khun and Rak. 

Endorsi looks at Shibisu expectantly, but Shibisu doesn’t elaborate on his nightmare—just waves his hands hastily and says, “Sounds like we all had bad dreams. Gotta say, though—if this is part of the whole Nightmare Floor schtick, that’s not so bad, right? Like, it can’t spook us to death.”

Hatz levels him an unimpressed look. “You seemed close to it last night.” 

Shibisu twists himself into some bizarre fighting pose. “Don’t be crazy. What do I have to be afraid of, with my prowess in the killing arts?”

Anak rolls her eyes, and says something sarcastic, but Bam doesn’t catch it, because— 

—that’s Rachel. In this manor. On this floor. 

In this hallway.

Rachel, in the flesh, her blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. She’s hanging back in the shadow of the hallway leading into the dining room, her eyes like yellow lighters in the dark. Radioactive. When she catches his eyes, she smiles, slow and grim. 

“Bam,” she says, and the rest of the world falls away.

“What are you…” he trails off, unsure of where to start, what to feel. Alarm and confusion, fear and anger—all four war for purchase in his expression, fighting to be voiced first. He rises slowly from his chair, struggling to make her out in the dark. 

And then the decision is made for him, because she’s holding a needle. And it’s pointed at Khun, who has his back to her unawares.

The grim smile twists into something darker as she makes her way forward, slow steps into quick steps into a run. 

Bam bolts out of his seat. “Khun, get away!” 

Khun blinks. “Huh?”

But he’s too slow—Rachel is just a step away from stabbing him. Bam jumps in between them, shoving Khun out of the way blindly. Khun stumbles backwards in shock while the rest of the team jumps out the way, looking around in confusion.

“Bam, what are you doing?” someone asks. 

Do they not see her? How can they not see her?

Her face is cast in shadow, but she’s not smiling anymore. The set of her mouth is tense, angry. “Why do you get everything? You don’t deserve any of it.” She holds onto her needle with both hands, points it at Khun. “Why should you get to keep him? He was my lightbearer first.”

“Get away from him,” he hisses.

“Who are you talking to?” That’s Endorsi’s voice. She sounds concerned. Why is she not—why isn’t she— 

“Why should you keep him,” Rachel repeats, “when you do such a terrible job of it? You almost killed them yesterday, Bam. That’s what you do. Monster. Arlene always called you a monster.” She breaks into a smile again. “You didn’t believe me when I said it. But now you’ve seen it for yourself, haven’t you?” She walks forward until the tip of her needle rests lightly against the small of Khun’s back. Khun doesn’t seem to feel it, doesn’t move, but Bam’s throat closes up in fear. “You saw the way he walked right into Jahad’s army. The way he danced last night. He doesn’t want to be near you. None of them do.”

“Rachel, stop,” he says. He hates how his voice shakes. “This was always between you and me. Leave my friends out of this.”

( “Rachel? What the fuck?”

“I—I don’t think she’s really here. It must be—”)

Her smirk turns sour. “Your friends, huh?” But she sheathes the needle again, and steps backwards. “Alright. You’ve always wanted to settle things with me. Let’s do that.” She looks askance at Bam’s team. “Away from them.” 

And then she’s leading him away, out of the dining room and back out into the main hallway. There’s a staircase now, one that definitely hadn’t been there last night. It’s narrow and winding, twisting up and up and up in spires. There’s only room enough for one person at a time, and it creaks with each step Bam takes. 

(“Bam! Bam, stop! Where are you—”)

But he follows her—he runs up the stairs two steps at a time, even though he doesn’t remember her being this fast. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registers that something is off. But there’s no time for that. There is only Rachel as she leads him up the staircase, past the first and second and third floors, past the attic, all the way up to the roof.

Rachel stands facing him, her back to the edge of the building. She takes small, slow steps backwards. “Poor Bam,” she coos. “You haven’t changed at all. So afraid of being left behind.” She looks pointedly behind him, and Bam risks a glance backwards to see Khun, approaching him slowly. 

“Bam,” Khun says calmly, carefully. “Bam, let’s go back downstairs.” 

“I can kill him from here,” Rachel tells Bam. “Do you want to see? I’ve been practicing. We can’t all be unfairly gifted, but I’ve been practicing.”

Bam twists back around to face her. “You said this was between us!” 

“It is.” She’s unsheathed the needle again, and is pointing it in Khun’s direction. “He’s always stood between us. Always.” 

“Bam,” comes Khun’s voice behind him. “We should get off the roof.” 

“Yes,” Rachel agrees. “I think that’s a good idea.” And then she’s moving to attack—

—and Bam charges to tackle her— 

—only to swipe at air and empty space. 

“Bam!” Khun shouts, sounding scared, and that’s when Bam realizes he’s in freefall, down down down. “Shit!”

His head hurts. It pounds. Everything flies past his field of vision so quickly, and then everything seems to darken. From the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees something blue hurtling towards him, something glowing, before everything fades to black.

“You’ve really got to stop doing that,” Khun tells him, when he wakes up. Bam squints at him, trying to decide whether he sounds exasperated or amused. Maybe just tired. 

“What happened?”

“You followed an illusion of Rachel up to the roof. And then you fell right off of it.”

Bam jolts upright. “Rachel! Where is she?” 

Khun pushes him back down. “Never there,” he says.

Bam opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it again. Open, close. “But… she was here,”  he says dumbly. “I saw her.” 

“It was the manor playing tricks on you. Think about it. None of us could see her. You were just telling us how you dreamt about her last night. It makes sense. Why would she even be here in the first place?”

It’s… it’s true. It’s sound logic. But he saw her, he saw her. 

She’d been so vivid.

Rachel, in that pink dress, her hair tied up in a ponytail. The image is bright and vivid, seared into his memories like a burn scar. A girl pinned beneath him, dissolving into gold. A girl with her hands on his shoulders, shoving him away. 

Rachel, with the sharp edge of a needle pointed squarely at Khun’s back, like a composite of his memories and nightmares. Khun on the Hidden Floor, clutching at his chest as he fell to his knees. Rachel, wild-eyed and smug, calling Bam a monster as she escaped. 

He’d gone on a rampage that day, too—the Thorn fragment, hovering angrily at his back, red and throbbing like an open wound. Himself, crackling with a kind of dark electricity that he neither understood nor cared to understand. Crying like a child, shaking uncontrollably.

Then Rachel had escaped and everything had quieted, and all that had been left was the aftermath of his own helpless frustration: rubble and debris, destruction as far as the eye could see. And then he’d thought that maybe she was right. 

Monster, she’d said, just before she fled. Arlene always called you a monster. 

His dream had recreated it perfectly.

“An illusion,” Khun repeats firmly, and Bam startles back into the present. “How are you feeling?”

The question alerts him to the throbbing in his head, insistent and relentless. He winces. “Not great,” he admits. “I have a pretty bad headache.”

Khun frowns. “I was thinking,” he starts slowly, “that you should sit this one out. Tonight’s ball, I mean.”

Bam had started to relax under the covers, but now he shoots back up, alarmed and vehement. The sudden movement makes him dizzy, makes the room spin and his head split, but— “No,” he insists. “What? Why? No.”

“I don’t think the manor will care as long as someone’s dancing,” Khun says, like that’s any explanation.

“But—” He fumbles for words, comes up short. He’s not good at this—debating on the fly. “Can’t I do something?” he tries. “I can help.”

Khun smiles a half-smile. “I don’t think your skillset is well-suited for this floor,” he says, not unkindly.

And he’s right. Bam can’t dance, can’t fight the ghosts, can’t do anything without destroying everything. The Nightmare Floor is just what it says on the tin—a series of nightmares, a test of mental fortitude. And Bam is the one who ignited three Thorn fragments, burned a bunch of souls, and vaporized an entire army for a reason he doesn’t even understand.

He can still smell the smoke, can still see the gold drifting past his nose, like snow in sunset. Like fireflies. The memory burns as vividly as any other—he has always been especially good at remembering the aftermath of his own destruction. It is always paired with being left.

But there is nothing on this floor for him to destroy. Except himself, maybe.

Khun’s right. He’s right, but even so— 

“I’m going,” Bam says stubbornly, and lies back down, folding his arms over his chest. 

There's the ball. He stares pointedly at the ceiling and does not make eye contact.

“I’m going,” he repeats. The aftermaths of his rampages are not the only thing he dreams about. 

When Bam wakes again, he is alone, and the room is dark. 

He winces as he sits up. His entire body feels sore, as if he’d been running nonstop for the—he checks his pocket—four hours that he’d fallen asleep. He doesn’t remember Khun leaving. When did Khun leave? Probably not long after he’d passed out. How did he sleep for four hours? And how is he still so tired? He can’t shake the feeling that he dreamt about something—about running from something. Hiding from something. Even now, he feels like he’s being watched. 

According to Bam’s pocket, it is only early afternoon—but the sky outside is unmistakably dark, with only the faint impression of sunset. A couple of streaks of lavender as the sky sinks into a deep violet. Not long, then, before the night starts again. Before— 

Anxiety spikes through him, squeezes him. 

The ball. There is another ball tonight. 

He swings both feet over the bed and down to the floor, fumbling to slip on his shoes. Save for the sound of his arm rustling through jacket sleeves, the manor is eerily quiet. 

Where is everyone? Did they leave without him?

Heart pounding, he swings open the door to the hallway— 

—and finds himself outside, staring out at an expanse of green grass, and standing on cobblestone. 

He blinks. “What—”

“Black Turtle!”

Rak’s voice. Bam turns to his left and sees Rak, Shibisu, and Hatz, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the lawn, playing cards. “Bam,” Hatz greets. “How are you feeling?” 

Bam doesn’t know where to start. “Where is everyone?” is what he eventually manages. 

Shibisu beams. “The manor kicked us out. I walked out of my room and ended up out here. Same for everyone else. The rest of them wandered off somewhere. We’ve been out here for about an hour. Wanna play Go Fish?” 

Bam looks at him suspiciously. “You’re pretty calm about all this.” 

Shibisu shrugs. “We’ve had an hour to let it sink in,” he points out. “The manor will let us back in eventually. In about twenty minutes, if we’re going by yesterday’s schedule. Not much else we can do in the meantime.” He holds up his cards invitingly. “Go Fish?” 

“I don’t know what that is,” Bam informs him. “Where’s everyone else?” 

Ran is playing video games in the dark. Anak and Endorsi are sparring in the gardens.

Khun is sitting by the water.

“Pretty nice,” he says, when Bam approaches, “for a haunted house. Don’t you think?” 

Bam doesn’t disagree. He’d guessed that there was probably a beach or shore of some kind near the manor last night, but he hadn’t expected this—a wide and quiet dock on the other side of the manor, stretching into calm blue water, lined with tall lamps on either side. Beneath the dock rests a sandy shore, freckled with pebbles and tall grasses. The shore slowly transforms into rock and soil in the direction of the manor, but the sand by the water looks soft and pale, only darkened where the water haunts it, ghosts of the waves that had once touched it. 

“How are you feeling?” Khun asks.

“Better,” Bam says. “Stupid.”

“Don't. The rest of us ended up seeing stuff we dreamed about, too. Guess that’s why they call it the Nightmare Floor.” His mouth, which had been quirked upwards at the corners, now tenses and turns solemn. “Endorsi saw her adoptive parents after you passed out. Ran saw Maschenny while we were in the kitchen. Just before you saw Rachel.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Yeah,” Khun says. “When I woke up.” He looks up at Bam and smiles wryly. “But I didn’t follow it off a roof.”

Bam’s face heats up as he sits down next to him, letting his feet dangle over the edge of the pier, a few feet above the water.

It’s probably a rude thing to ask, but. “What did you see?”

Khun doesn’t answer for a long, long moment, his eyes trained on something in the distance. Bam follows his example and stares down at the shore beneath the dock, while he waits for Khun to speak. The sun sinks gently down, casting the water in a reddish-orange color. At his feet, the tide inches slightly higher, darting forward to brush a tentative hand over sand and then retreating again, shy and uncertain. Bam thinks he knows the feeling.

That’s what it is with Khun, sometimes. Arms holding him close at the Nest, and a hand frozen mid-reach on the 52nd floor.

The waves hush him soothingly, as if they are asking his thoughts to quiet. Shh, shh, like they too know that there is something fragile lingering on this shore. 

“Nothing as bad as what you saw,” Khun says finally. Not a real answer. Bam shouldn’t have expected one, and so he’s not surprised. Disappointed, maybe. But not surprised. 

Would you tell me if it were? he considers asking. 

“No point in thinking about that now,” Khun continues, “since we have the ball in a bit.”

An entire other reason to be stressed. 

Bam swallows. “Are you really going to…” He doesn’t know how to continue the sentence—only has an image of legs twining, hands touching, eyes staring. “Alone?” he finishes lamely. 

Khun shrugs. “Sure. Not like I need Endorsi’s help to dance.”

“But is it really that easy?” Bam asks skeptically. “You just have to dance with the sm—the ghost? For how long? Won’t you be tired? What if something happens?”

“Are you worried?” He sounds amused.

Bam is not. Bam thinks about the strange well of anxiety that had gripped him that evening, squeezing his chest until it was a balloon ready to burst, and confesses, “Yes.”

“Why? It’s just dancing.” Khun laughs.

“Are you sure she won’t…” Bam makes hand-wavy gestures, “try something?”

“No worse than our family balls,” he assures mysteriously, and Bam wants to shake him, because that’s still not an answer.

But Khun is always like this. His plans are kept close-to-chest, and no one else learns about them until they’ve already been enacted, carried to fruition. Bam is okay with that. Usually. But—

Fall back.

Forget about me.

His memories have always been vivid, but something about the Nightmare Floor colors them in a way he’s never experienced—not just technicolor vivid, but larger than life, all-consuming. He relives them constantly.

The sun has mostly set, and where the sky has darkened to midnight, Bam sees a pale spot of light—the moon, quiet and unassuming. In the dark, under that light, Khun’s hair pales to silver, and he seems to glow at the edges. He looks more moonlight than man; Bam has the strange, disconcerting feeling that if he were to reach out to touch him, his hand would pass right through him. 

Then, to his alarm, Khun rises to his feet. “Come on,” he says. “Manor’s probably ready. We should go.” He reaches a hand down to pull Bam up, looks at him expectantly.

And Bam—doesn’t take it. Bam just sits there, unmoving, and stares at Khun’s hand, at Khun’s profile, moonlit and soft and barely-there.

There is so much that people seem to want—from the tower, from him. Money and power, vengeance and honor. There is so much he’s been told to want—righteousness, justice. Answers. Only he’s realized, recently, that answers usually just lead to more questions. 

So much to want, all these high and lofty things.

But here, on this quiet dock, Bam realizes that maybe he doesn’t actually want all that much. That in this moment, on this dock, what he wants most is just this: a few more minutes sitting side-by-side under moonlight, their feet dangling over water, exchanging wishbone words over the sound of waves shushing them softly—

Shh, shh.  

Chapter Text

There is something different about the ball tonight.

It starts the same way it did the night before—light, wispy music drifting in spires around the room. Faceless strangers conversing with each other, gathered at the edges of the dance floor. Bam and his team, standing on guard, watching the piano-black grandfather clock in the corner. 

At fifteen minutes, the hands stop.

Bam sneaks an unhappy glance at Khun, who takes a couple of long strides to the front of the group, shoulders back and chin tipped high. He looks expressionless, maybe even bored—but then the music changes. 

The soft, wispy spires harden to a sharp staccato—abrupt march-like beats that start and stop. The rhythm of it is as violent as it is flirtatious, somewhere between the teasing of a lover and the stabbing of a knife, and Bam feels his heartbeat following the rise and fall of the music as the melody kicks in—something melancholy and keening, straining. It’s not unpleasant, but even as Bam recognizes it as a tango, he finds himself wondering how anyone can possibly dance to this—this song that sounds like a battle, sounds like war.

“That’s strange,” Hatz says. “It didn’t start like this last night.”

Khun and Ran exchange a look. “Within expectations,” Khun says, and crosses the distance to the center of the ballroom in a few languid steps. 

“We all learn to tango when we’re kids,” Ran explains, as if he weren’t still a kid. “It’s the first dance they teach us. It’s the official dance of our family.” He shrugs. “We don’t do it as much anymore, but back home, whenever there’s a party like this… the opening dance is always a tango. A.A.’s really good at it.” 

No one replies, and an uncomfortable silence falls over the group at the implication, because— 

The manor knows.

The manor knows Khun will be the one dancing. The manor knows Khun favors the tango. The manor is listening.

On the dance floor, a young woman walks up to Khun. It’s the same girl from the previous evening—the smoke-girl, today dressed in silver and red. She doesn’t speak—only presents herself to Khun, peeking up at him from under dark lashes. 

There is something different about her tonight, something off-putting in her face. She looks different somehow—even more ghost-like, like she is evaporating at the edges, a mere suggestion of a person. Her silhouette dissolves and reshapes itself over and over, trying on different physical forms the way Endorsi tries on clothing—quick, impatient, eager. 

Bam watches her warily. Her face is still indiscernible, but her hair seems to curl and elongate as she moves. It takes on a reddish hue and falls at her waist like a flame, and something about the way she smiles at Khun makes him stiffen, like he recognizes something in her. Bam thinks he might recognize her too—thinks he must have met her somewhere. There is something unshakably familiar about her.

But Khun only extends a hand, which she graciously takes.

The melody has started to quiet, and Bam allows himself to be lulled into a state of calm—but then it rises again sharply, and Bam’s heart stops entirely at the way Khun abruptly pulls the smoke-girl in towards his chest, right on beat.

Bam has seen this before, has already seen Khun tango once. But it still doesn’t prepare him for the press of their bodies, for the way that they stare at each other—low-lidded and dark, an argument without words. It’s part of the dance, it must be part of the dance, but he still swallows at the sight of all that intense and vivid blue, focused on—

He forces himself to stop, tries to get out of his own head.

Now that he knows what he’s watching for, small details stick out in ways they hadn’t before—the way Khun takes his steps, weighted and lingering, pushing each step off of the ball of his foot. Each step feels heavy, powerful—like he is just barely restraining his want. Want which doesn’t exist, if the blankness of his expression is anything to go by, but his movements don’t betray that at all. 

A.A.’s really good at it, Ran had said, and Bam can see why.

He twirls her away from him in a snap motion, but then she spins back into him, stopping on the last twirl only to fall straight into him, loosely draping her arms around his neck and leaving him to catch her. And that can’t have been choreographed, but Khun looks unfazed. He places one hand around her waist, one around the small of her back, catching her neatly and letting her arch into him even as she allows herself to angle almost parallel to the floor— 

—and then he slowly lifts her again, moves her back to standing, only she’s not stepping back, not arching back away from him to give him space. She stays arched where she is, and when he gently moves her back to standing, she leans into him more, until their foreheads and noses touch. Her hands come up to rest on either side of his head, holding him close to her as they continue to dance, taking those long, lingering steps around the room. 

They move together as a unit, dazzling and magnetizing, and Bam thinks—that this must be what it means, for something to be greater than the sum of its parts.

Partway into those lingering steps, the smoke-girl starts to morph again. Her hair pulls itself back until it falls into a long ponytail, but the transformation stops there, still simmering at the seams, like she’s testing something out. Bam squints. Something about the look is a little unsettling, but he can’t put his finger on what it is.

The dance continues.

Smooth sensuality—the slow rolling of hips, as the woman steps in a figure-eight; the caress of her ankle, her stiletto as she cants it up Khun’s leg—

—punctuated by sudden movements, sharp push-and-pulls. Khun letting her go only to pull her back in, fierce and possessive. Her body follows like an extension of his, moving where he moves her. Those snap embraces in and out, their mouths barely a breath apart. 

Bam’s own mouth feels very dry.

He watches as the girl hooks a leg around Khun’s thigh, as she leans forward like she’s falling into him, as Khun leads her into him. He watches as their bodies press flush against each other, as they twist together sinuously, cheek to cheek. He watches as Khun abruptly snaps her to face him in a sharp embrace at a swell in the music, and he wants very badly to look away. 

But he can’t.

Because the smoke-girl is leaning up to murmur something in Khun’s ear. Red lips, curved in a crescent moon, sly and malicious. Khun’s face sours at whatever she says, and Bam has to know, has to know —

The music takes a heavy turn, and Khun pulls her back in with such force that she nearly stumbles. Bam is too far away to hear what he says, but he’s close enough to read Khun’s lips reasonably well, and he thinks Khun hisses, “ Don’t.”

She closes her eyes in silent laughter.

As if in disgust, Khun spins her away from him in a twirl, and in that twirl her ponytail lengthens further. Her hair darkens and her dress blackens, extends until it’s more a robe than a gown—smoke sweeping to cover her arms, her legs, her whole body, and when her eyes open again, Bam figures out what the unsettling feeling is. 

The smoke-girl has morphed into Jyu Viole Grace.

“A little unfair, isn’t it?” Khun says, when she—he—twirls back into him. “No one else’s nightmares are on open display. Why me?”

He can tell, by the startled murmuring behind him, that his team sees it too. Jyu Viole Grace, hair long and expression cold, a husk of an ignition weapon, a placeholder for FUG’s Thorn fragment. A boy turned god.

Khun had hated him. Has hated him every time he’s seen him. 

I never thought I’d see you again, he thinks. I never wanted to see you again. 

But where Bam goes, Viole follows—at the Workshop Battle, on the Name Hunt Floor, on the Hidden Floor. Again and again, an unshakable shadow. 

“You volunteered,” the ghost says. Its voice is distorted, but there is the unmistakable undertone of Bam’s voice. For all of FUG’s work in transforming Bam into Viole, that was one thing they’d never quite managed to disguise.

A crumbling building, damp and dark. Rubble and dust and debris. And someone shouting his name, fierce and terrified.

And himself, simultaneously sharpened and dulled by want.

Khun breathes, exhales the thought like waste.

“I was made to volunteer,” he murmurs, during a doble frente, “by design. So, I repeat—why me?”

The ghost smiles. It hasn’t fully solidified into Viole; its form remains only an insinuation of him, unstable and shifting, but Khun’s memory traitorously fills in the gaps of Viole’s face where the ghost falls short.

In that distorted voice, it replies, “Your fears are shared, Khun Aguero Agnis. They are not your own.”

Khun stiffens. “I’m not afraid of Jyu Viole Grace,” he hisses. “And neither is anyone else here.” 

The ghost’s smile widens. A smile on Jyu Viole Grace’s face, baring teeth. Despite himself, Khun feels dread settle in his stomach. “Aren’t they?” it whispers. “Let me show you.”

“He’s good, isn’t he,” Endorsi says. It’s not a question. “Better than I thought he’d be.” 

It takes a second for Bam to register that Endorsi has said something. He watches the scene before him with an awful sort of fixation, like staring at it will help him piece together the reason why his insides feel like shredded paper. 

There’s tension in that confetti, he thinks. Tension like he’s waiting for something to strike, coupled with a sort of nausea. The last time he’d seen himself in that form, Jyu Viole Grace, was on the Hidden Floor—when his doppelganger had sent a blast of shinsu right into Khun’s back. It’d been before the fire fish, and Khun had switched jackets before Bam could get a good look at the wound—but the bloody hole burnt through the first jacket had said enough. 

There’s fear, too, fear and suspicion. This floor can’t be as easy as just dancing with a ghost for an hour or two a day. There is a catch, and Khun maybe already knows what it is, but Bam is only starting to catch a glimpse of it—this ghost in his shape. Khun, dancing with the incarnation of all the things Bam hates most about himself.

So all Bam says to Endorsi’s comment is a stiff, “Yes.” 

Endorsi doesn’t respond, and after a long pause, Bam reluctantly tears his eyes away from the dance to glance at her.

She’s watching him consideringly. Bam wonders what she sees there. There’s an unhappy twist to her smirk, and at length she repeats, “Better than I thought he’d be.” She turns away from the dance, throws her next words over her shoulder. “Given the tango is all about sex.”

A few things then happen in rapid succession: Bam feels his face heat up and stutters something loud and unintelligible. Khun glances over at him, startled. The music slows to a close. 

Viole, currently draped over Khun, face at his neck and arm wrapped around his shoulders, senses the distraction and moves to stab him in the throat in a flash of silver.

Then, a blur.

There is a hiss of pain as Khun narrowly avoids being killed, a thin line of dark red where the knife grazes the skin at his neck. There is Bam, whirling away from Endorsi to look back at Khun and see all this happen. And in that moment, Bam forgets all about the fire fish, forgets all about the test. Even in the face of Khun’s blue, all Bam can see is red.

It’s—not all of his nightmares at once, but it’s a solid handful of them. 

The line of blood on Khun’s neck is whisper-thin but richly red, and it burns itself into Bam’s memory the way he imagines his Jyu Viole Grace’s shinsu might have burned through Khun’s jacket—straight into the flesh of him, the core of him, fierce and terrible and technicolor. It’s the red of bloody jackets and Thorn fragments and raining embers. It’s the red of boys walking into fire, brilliant and awful.

Bam watches as that streak of red makes its way down Khun’s neck, as if traced by an invisible finger. It slides along the curve of his throat, ensconces itself into the dip of his collarbone, and finally inks itself into the pale blue of his collar just so—a bloom of red, spreading and spreading and spreading, bleeding into the blue.

Shibisu grabs Bam’s arm as if to pull him back. “He’s fine,” he says urgently. “You can’t go!” And only then does Bam realize that he’s ignited a Thorn fragment and is already angled at the dance floor where Khun stands, still mid-embrace with Viole, as if in shock.

Bam’s throat works wordlessly. “But—” he grits out, frustrated—

And then, behind them, the grandfather clock chimes. Bam whips back around to stare at it, and then at Khun.

The ball is over.

Like the night before, the music stops, and the guests freeze. Jyu Viole Grace retreats slowly, and Bam’s eyes dart between him and Khun nervously. But the ghost dissipates without further fanfare, and the double doors appear. Their cue to exit.

Khun doesn’t move. 

He stays standing in the center of the dance floor, staring blankly at something that isn’t there. His arms dangle at his sides. He looks—he looks—

“Khun,” Shibisu says gently. 

And then Khun, with all the agonizing slowness of sunset, turns to face them. His gaze passes over the other occupants of the room until, like brambles, they catch on Bam. 

And what can Bam say to him? His own guilt grows like a thorn in his throat. Jyu Viole Grace, that cut on his neck, all of it. His ghosts have ghosts, his ghosts have claws, and they attack everyone that isn’t him. He swallows, and tastes blood.

In that interim, Khun blinks out of whatever daze he was in. He swipes a quick hand over the slash of red on his neck. And then he makes his way back to the team. He does not meet anyone’s eyes for a long, long time.

The rest of the team chatters about the manor as they walk out of the ballroom, but Bam hangs back. His legs carry him forward mechanically, but Bam feels as though he’s not really there—not really in that hallway, walking two feet behind the rest of the team, dragging his feet away from a haunted ballroom. The hall is dim, all softly shuttering lights and quiet shadows, but none of it really registers. He keeps his eyes fixed on the floor in front of his feet, and scenes from the ball play for him like a movie, like a looped video— 

Himself, his own likeness, lunging forward to stab Khun. Jyu Viole Grace had moved so quickly that the knife had become a blur, just a swipe of linear silver in the air, and then it’d faded and left that streak of red in its wake, slim and sickly trickling along Khun’s neck.

The debrief had been quick and quiet. 

“Just another nightmare,” Khun had said tonelessly. “The dances aren’t any different from the hallucinations in the rest of the manor. Just more vivid. And shared.” And then, “Jyu Viole Grace made sense.”

No one had known what to say to that. No one had so much as glanced at Bam, but he’d known. He’d known. He didn’t have to be a strategist to know—the floor feeds off their fears, and so someone had been afraid of what had just happened. Viole, offing people with unfeeling efficiency like some kind of killer robot. Not so far off from the truth. 

Someone had been afraid, and it was probably him.

In nearly the same instant he’d remembered that blast of shinsu, that bloody jacket on the Hidden Floor, the Nightmare Floor’s version of Jyu Viole Grace had acted—lunged forward in a swipe of silver, begetting a swipe of red.  

It’d been him. It was always him. All these pieces of him, souls and Thorn fragments and monsters and monsters and monsters, cobbled together to make something never-whole. Cobbling together, and never being enough. 

But then there’d been Khun.

The evening is over, and the trickle of music in the ballroom has long since silenced, but Bam still hears it—those march-like violins, sweeping in the way Khun had swept that ghost of Viole off its feet, literally. Bodies tangled and intertwined in some frenetic two-person game of tag. Chasing touch, chasing each other. Coming together, and being greater-than. Coming together and being better. Greater than the sum of their parts.

And it was just a dance, and they’d just been following the rules, but— 

Bam shivers.

It’s not that Khun doesn’t know what the manor is doing. It’s just that he hadn’t realized it was a fear of his in the first place.

Viole, silent and expressionless. Viole, sweeping dark hair and black robes. Viole the ignition weapon, Viole the god. Viole, Viole, Viole. 

The knife hadn’t scared him. The cut hadn’t, either—he couldn’t use the fire fish on anyone else, but he could’ve healed himself just fine. A slash over his throat was no different from a papercut to him, even if no one else seemed to think so.

But the attack. The dance, and then the attack. Firm shoulders under his touch, Bam’s voice, his face, all of those features held so close—and then gone. Swiped away with the swipe of a knife. Jyu Viole Grace’s smile replacing Bam’s, baring teeth. A stinging pain on his neck to remember him by.

I’m not afraid of Jyu Viole Grace, he’d said. And neither is anyone else here. 

But he’d been wrong. On both counts.

He slides a glance over his shoulder to where Bam trails behind the rest of the group, eyes downcast, and considers saying something. 

But then someone whispers in his ear, amused, “Did you have fun?” 

This again.

Khun ignores the voice, but she continues, “Dancing with him. Didn’t it look like him?”

Yes, he thinks, unwilling and unbidden, and Hwaryun’s laugh rings in his ear like she heard him. 

He keeps his expression fixed, doesn’t allow himself to react. There’s a ghost in the manor. This isn’t news.

He doesn’t know what the others saw this morning, and he doesn’t ask. He’d seen Anak come out of her room looking haunted and hollow, Bam walk out looking more hunted than human, and had known that there are some memories better left buried. There are things in the world better not discussed.

And so there’s no reason to bring up the illusion of Hwaryun that appears in the corner of his vision, at random points in the day. At his elbow during breakfast. Behind Bam last night on the pier. In front of him, hand in hand during that stupid ball, while Khun tangoed with a nightmare.

But the night’s over, and Khun knows what the ghost is doing. So he focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, allowing motor memory to carry him through the hallway, when the ghost materializes as Hwaryun at his back.

“You would’ve let him stab you,” she observes. “You almost did. You hesitated.” 

The others continue conversing as usual. Once again, none of them see her. Khun faces forward, and doesn’t dignify her question with an answer.

“Is that your answer?” she continues, amused. “How many times are you going to make me ask?”

You’re not her, he thinks at her. You’re not real. 

But she only smirks at him, and asks the same question she always does—

“What would you do for him?”

An illusion. He knows it’s an illusion. Just another of the manor’s tricks, another memory pulled from his unconscious, designed to hurt him. He has so many. He’s sure the manor hasn’t been short on options.

Real-life Hwaryun has asked him this question so many times that he is almost desensitized to it. She doesn’t materialize from thin air to bother him while he’s eating breakfast the way this illusion of her does, but it’s the same question, the same six words. Over and over and over. 

The first time had been that morning on the rooftop, discovering after six long years that Bam was Jyu Viole Grace. She had parried his punch without so much as a blink, looking bored and amused at the blood dripping from his fist, and asked, “What would you do for him?”

What a ridiculous question. What would he do for him?

Carry Rachel up the Tower for him, be her legs for him. Take vengeance for him. Kill his killers for him, only—only, he wasn’t dead at all. Bam was alive. Bam was alive. 

The force of that realization untethered him, and the answer to her question was too obvious to bother voicing aloud. 

Khun had chosen to stay in a collapsing building rather than walk away from a hint of a ghost of a person he’d thought was dead.

And Hwaryun is a guide, so she knows. Knows what it means to follow an Irregular up the Tower. Knows what it means for a son of Khun, with all his wants and limitations.

Knows that his answer has been, for a while now— I would die for him. 

This ghost of Hwaryun watches him, calm and wicked and pitying, a carbon copy of the expression that real-life Hwaryun shows him each time she asks this question, and he knows he’s answered incorrectly again. It’s not the answer she’s looking for, neither Hwaryun nor this faithful imitation of her, but Khun doesn’t have any other answers for her. Not then, and not now.

When they finally reach their rooms, Khun excuses himself with a muttered, “I’m going to get some air,” and walks right out the front door. Bam watches him go like someone has hidden the moon away just to spite him.

Shibisu observes, and sighs.

It’s a weird thing, to see and be seen. A weird thought hits him every time he experiences it—like, Oh. There you are. There you’ve been, this whole time. 

He’d never been good at much else, just at this, just seeing and being seen—only the Tower isn’t especially kind to people who allow themselves to be seen. It hadn’t been kind to his friend, and Shibisu had been there to watch the aftermath of that disaster firsthand, had been there to promise to climb the Tower for her, in the only way he’d known how.

He’d made a clumsy pass at blustering and bluffing, teaming up with Anak and Hatz through truly bizarre luck, babbling some nonsense about his mastery of the killing arts that they’d either bought (Hatz) or ignored (Anak). And he’d been prepared to climb the Tower that way, blustering and bluffing—but then he’d met Khun, and immediately known that it’d never be enough, to keep his promise that way. He’d met Khun and thought, there was a person who knew how to see and not be seen. There was a person—specially trained to climb the Tower, an opaque screen guarding smoky intentions, wispy and ever-changing. 

But then there’d been Bam, so unabashed in his fears and wants, shameless and sure and sincere, seen and seen and seen, like the concept of hiding himself hadn’t even really occurred to him—or, at the very least, like he hadn’t known how to. Later on the Test Floor, after that whole Rachel epiphany, Shibisu had learned why.

And then things had changed, a little. These days, Khun flaunts his loyalties openly—his loyalty, Shibisu should say, to one person. Unseen and unobserved save for this one thing, worn on his arm like a badge, or a warning. And Bam had veered in the opposite direction, still unabashedly sincere, but increasingly reserved, increasingly uncertain, all these fears collected at the core of himself, tucked and guarded tightly, like a heartbeat.

Shibisu had met Bam on the Test Floor and thought immediately, Oh, there you are. 

He hasn’t had that thought about Bam or Khun for a while now.

And—y’know, that’s okay. It’s not like Shibisu’s out there in the world, looking to creep on people. It’s okay if he isn’t the one doing the seeing. It’s okay to not be seen. But he thinks that—that maybe they should, with each other. See, and be seen. 

But instead they’ve bled into this weird middle point, where there is some seeing and some being seen and never enough of either.

Like paint stains, Hockney had said once, when Shibisu threw his hands up in frustration over the whole thing. Like watercolors. 

Dyed in each other’s colors, yeah, Shibisu gets it. Not helpful, but he gets it.

But that’s neither here nor there.

He takes one look at Bam’s crestfallen expression, and claps his hands together. “I think,” he announces, “that we all need some air. And alcohol. Who’s with me?”

Everyone is with him.

Shibisu digs through the kitchen cabinets until he finds the liquor stash—the manor may be haunting them, but at least it’s well-stocked—and grabs an armful. Hatz’s eyes light up at the soju, and he pulls out a couple of extra bottles for good measure. Shibisu nods at him approvingly. “Good man,” he says, heartfelt.

They go outside with the intention of finding a nice patch of grass to sit on, then realize that the manor has thoughtfully built them a little patio, complete with a table and chairs and everything. Everyone stares at it suspiciously, and Shibisu in particular is unsure whether to laugh or cry, but ultimately decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth and plonks his armful of hard liquor onto the table. Hatz follows his cue, clearly more interested in the soju than in whether the patio is going to like, eat them alive.

“This,” Shibisu announces, pouring himself a glass, “is the good life.”

Endorsi arches an eyebrow. “Is it,” she deadpans, but pours herself a glass of wine. 

Half an hour of drinking seems to ease the tension a bit. The residual unease around the Jyu Viole Grace clone and that really fucking weird tango starts to fade. Anak and Endorsi go back to sniping at each other; Hatz and Ran strike up a weirdly sincere conversation about sword technique; Rak, who never looked bothered in the first place, retrieves the fruit basket from the kitchen.

Shibisu sneaks the occasional glance at Bam, whose shoulders appear to loosen with each additional sip of soju he takes, and tries not to smile. Yeah, bigshot FUG Slayer out on the battlefield, but can’t even down a bottle of fruit soju. What are they going to do with him?

But then the half hour passes, and Rak, who should maybe spend less time throwing spears and more time learning how to read a room, slams his palm against the table and roars, “Why is Blue Turtle not back yet?”

Bam freezes and Shibisu winces, starts to jump in with something placating, but then Ran looks up and says, “Maybe he went out for a run.”

Shibisu looks at him in surprise. “Does he do that?” he asks. He can’t recall ever seeing Khun go out alone for a run. 

Ran rests his chin in his hand, props his elbows up on the table, and blows a bubble. He’s chewing gum again. That really can’t be good for his teeth. Where does this kid get all this gum? “A.A. used to race us, back home,” he says. “I think he liked running. He’s pretty fast.” 

“Khun, racing people for fun?” Shibisu says incredulously. “No way. I swear to god, Khun sleeps with one eye open.” 

Ran shrugs, clearly disinterested in this topic of conversation. “He used to play basketball with us. With his old team. After you guys.” 

Shibisu’s jaw drops. “He played basketball? Do you know how many times I’ve asked him to play basketball?”

“I have no idea why,” Endorsi chips in. “You’re terrible at it.” 

Shibisu points a finger at her accusingly. “That’s because you use Bong Bong!”

Endorsi smirks and leans back. 

“Blue Turtle is playing basketball by himself? In the dark?” Rak demands. 

Sometimes Shibisu feels like he’s running a circus. Mastery of the killing arts aside, he should really get paid for this.

He turns to Bam, who’s been listening to the whole conversation in silence, face slightly flushed. Shibisu glances down at the almost-empty bottle of soju in his hands, then back up again at Bam, and grins. 

It’s like the soju has melted away some of the veneer there—some of that nice, FUG-painted and Evankhell-shined polish. If Shibisu squints, he thinks he can see through it—through to their friend from the Test Floor, sitting in front of him now in all of his plaintiveness, open and longing and afraid.

“Playing basketball in the dark sounds dangerous," Shibisu says casually. "Maybe you should go fetch him. Make sure he’s okay. I’m sure he’s around here somewhere.” When Bam hesitates, he adds gently, “Bring him here.”

Their eyes meet when Bam gets up to go. Shibisu looks at him, looks at all that painful sincerity, and thinks warmly, fondly, and a little sadly, Oh. There you are. 

There you’ve been, this whole time. 

It takes a bit of searching, but eventually, in a moment that feels like deja-vu, Bam finds Khun sitting on the dock.

Time is strange here, on this floor. It has been evening for hours now, has been dark for some time. But out on the dock, by the water, it looks to be dusk. The sky is bruise-blue, the air a quiet breath against his skin, soft and almost warm—as though the sun hasn’t quite set here yet, even though it can’t be more than a mile from the main house. It gives Bam the sense that time doesn’t quite reach this part of the floor, where earth melts into water, just a short walk away from the ghosts that haunt the manor.

A light breeze sweeps through Khun’s hair and carries his words to Bam, absent and musing. “I spent a lot of time by the sea as a kid. Just to be alone.”

Bam watches his profile. “Do you like the water?”

“Sometimes,” he says. The answer is too vague to be satisfying, and Bam feels it again—this urgency, this need to keep Khun here like it’s a race against time, a race against inevitability. It is a race that he always runs alone.

The meaning of water and moonlight and inevitability, the meaning of sometimes. 

Tell me, he imagines saying, before you leave me.

Instead he says, “Ran said you used to race each other for fun.”

Khun turns to look at him, somewhere between confused and amused. “Yes,” he replies, mouth quirked upwards. “When we were little.” 

“You don’t do that anymore,” Bam ventures.

That makes him laugh. “I was ten,” he points out. The quirk of his mouth takes a wry turn. “I don’t know if I’d trust anyone to run alone into the woods with me now.”

And Bam wants to say no, wants to deny it—but then he remembers Khun walking into the fire alone. Remembers the tango, remembers the slash of red on his neck.   

And so instead he asks, “Is your cut okay?”

The ghost in red, the ghost of Jyu Viole Grace. Their knife at Khun’s throat, their hand on his cheek, the instep of their foot running up the side of his leg. Their eyes on Khun’s, sweeping up and down the length of his body like a touch. 

The image crowds out all other thoughts, and maybe that is why Bam reaches out to trace the shadow of Khun’s jaw, to trace the line of moonlight along Khun’s throat. In the chill of dusk, Khun’s skin feels like fire under his fingertips, and it pushes back against his touch in a steady beat—the steady staccato of a tango, maybe.

Khun swallows, and Bam feels that, too.

“It’s healed,” he says, but Bam is too taken by the vibrations in Khun’s throat to remove his hand. The day’s events fade away, the night evaporates where he sits—there is only the touch of fire, only the feeling of soundwaves reverberating into his fingers. It is strangely urgent—an awareness that he is acting on borrowed time, and so he keeps going, does not count the seconds that pass for fear of shattering this strange atmosphere, breaking this balance. 

He knows what his name sounds like—but he wonders what it would feel like with his fingertips pressed to Khun’s throat, wonders what those soundwaves would feel like, vibrating under his touch.

But then Khun reaches for his wrist, pulls Bam’s fingers away from his neck—and Bam startles like he’s been jolted. 

What is he doing?

Dusk finally bleeds into night, and Bam is suddenly grateful for the dark—his face is burning. “Sorry,” he blurts, and tries to follow it up with an explanation, but comes up blank. What can he possibly say? Sorry, weird night, don’t mind me, zoned out imagining you saying my name.  

He glances at the sea, midnight black beneath his feet, and briefly considers flinging himself into it. 

“Are you okay?” Khun asks, but there’s an odd cadence to the question, like he, too, is on the verge of leaping off the pier.

His hand is still wrapped around Bam’s wrist, though no longer pulling it away—just holding it, loose and gentle. Bam thinks, if he were to look down at his wrist, that there must be imprints where Khun touches him—that surely this is the kind of thing that would leave a trace, burn marks on his skin.

“What did she say to you?” Bam finds himself asking. “During the dance. Before she...” Turned into me.  

Khun’s expression flickers in a way that Bam might not have noticed before—but he finds he’s increasingly becoming a scholar in Khun’s faces, Khun’s few and tiny tells. “That I’m a good dancer,” Khun says dismissively, and lets Bam’s wrist go.

Bam’s heart sinks at the lie, at the loss of touch. “Oh,” he says, and doesn’t push, even though he is desperately curious. Don’t , Khun had hissed at her, in the aftermath of whatever she’d said. 

Don’t what? 

But he swallows the question, swallows his wants. “You are a good dancer,” he agrees. And then, “Could you teach me?” 

Apparently he does not swallow his wants hard enough.

Khun gives him a long look. “Teach you to dance?” 

Well, too late now. “To tango,” he says. 

“But why?” 

Uh. “I could’ve helped today if I knew how to dance,” Bam pointed out. “It could come in handy someday.” 

Khun is not an idiot, and he clearly doesn’t buy it. But Khun is also more about information-gathering than immediate confrontation, so all he does is stare at Bam for a bit longer, then shrug and stand up, settling into a starting position.

He still looks skeptical when he says, “Sure. Let’s try it. Why don’t you follow, to start?” His voice sounds a little strained, but Bam barely notices—can’t see much further than Khun’s hand, extended in his direction like a beckoning, an invitation. Permission to touch. 

He can’t get the memory of today’s tango out of his mind. He wonders what it’s like, to be hand in hand, arm in arm with someone—greater than the sum of their parts.   

Khun’s hands are cool and dry. They are also, to Bam’s slight surprise, mildly calloused—but of course they would be. He had seen for himself, just hours ago, Khun’s deftness with knives—even if it had come in the form of dodging someone else’s. 

All these people, too impressed by his cleverness to remember his viciousness, to remember that Khun made it up here not just on guile, but also razor edges and hyper-frozen ice. Bam is embarrassed to have fallen in with them. 

He looks up to see Khun watching him, still information-gathering, clearly calculating or assessing something—still waiting for something, maybe. A cue. 

Bam doesn’t have one for him. Bam’s body has been traitorous all night. Traitorous now, he hears himself ask, “Aren’t we supposed to stand closer than this?” 

The question seems to startle the calculating look out of him—Khun blinks in surprise, and then his expression clears. He quirks the corner of his mouth up in a tiny smirk. “I think that’s a little advanced for you,” he says. “Beginners usually prefer to keep a little more… personal space.”

Bam would like for the ground to open up and swallow him whole. Tragically, it does no such thing, and he scrambles to change the topic. “Oh. Yeah, of course. Makes total sense. Uh. So what do I do now?” 

Khun looks deeply amused. “Don’t step on my feet,” he says lightly. 

Bam forgets his embarrassment and gives him an exasperated look. “Well, yeah. But how?”

“I’ll lead you through a basic sequence. Just go where I lead you.”

That all sounds very vague—but Khun’s smile is confident and sure. They try it, and Bam keeps his eyes trained on their feet. 

“Relax,” Khun tells him. “You don’t stare at your feet when you walk, do you? Look up.”

He looks up, and immediately steps on Khun’s left foot. 

Khun laughs as Bam takes a hasty step back, horrified. “Okay, never mind,” he says. “Keep looking down if you want. But relax. It’s easier if you relax.”

Bam tries, even though the ask is impossible—relaxing, paradoxically, sounds incredibly stressful.

But when he does, the movement is unthinking. Khun’s hand is a gentle presence on his back, and he moves Bam like water, moves him like the moon pulls the tide, in tandem with those lapping waves on the shore. 

There are none of the flourishes or embellishments that Khun and the girl had engaged in—none of the twirls or twists or fancy footwork—but it is unbearably intimate, being guided through these lingering steps, with just the press of Khun’s hand on his shoulder blade. He is held, and he is untethered. 

“A tango,” Khun is explaining, “is a conversation in eight beats. It’s all about communication. The leader guides the conversation, and the follower responds.” 

Huh. “Not…” Bam trails off, but his mind in the gutter picks it right back up for him: ...sex?

Khun looks at him suspiciously. “Not what?”

It’s a lot, having Khun stare straight at him from a handful of inches away. It distracts him from common-sense things like not saying everything that pops up in his head. But he’s gotten this far on audacity and adrenaline alone, and the small, self-preservation part of him gets shoved aside by a trigger-happy voice that insists, Why stop now? It goes very well with Endorsi’s voice, a supporting chorus to her words from earlier, and he blurts them aloud: “Endorsi says the tango is all about sex.”

Khun drops his hand like a hot potato. “What?”

He should never be allowed to drink again. He didn’t even drink that much, he thinks despairingly. But clearly there’s a brain to body filter that’s been broken somewhere, somehow. He scrambles to explain, “While you were dancing today—the pretest, y’know, she was just commenting—but I didn’t really—that was why you turned around, by the way, sorry about that. Oh, but that’s not why I—”

Bam watches as Khun’s expression shifts from alarm to annoyance to embarrassment to—something. Bam stops keeping track. He looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm. Delicately, like the topic pains him, he says, “She’s wrong.”

“Oh.” Bam swallows. “Okay.”

“It can be,” Khun concedes primly, “but dances like this are always a conversation. Maybe it’s not always the same kind of conversation. The tango is more sensual than the waltz, so maybe that’s… but…” His face reddens. 

This conversation is entirely too theoretical for someone who has not yet mastered the basic skill of not stepping on their dance partner, but Bam nods anyway. “Right, that makes sense.”

“Why don’t you try?” Khun suggests. His voice is too smooth for this to not be an intentional topic change. Bam has seen him do this dozens of times at strategic meetings, and he has never been so grateful to have it done to him. “Try leading.” He shifts their stance somehow, and then Bam is holding instead of being held, Khun’s arm draped all the way across his back. The weight of it is warm like a blanket, electrifying like lightning.

“What do I do?”

“Copy what I did. Do a basic step like I showed you, and I’ll move with you.”

Bam tries, and almost steers Khun right off the dock and into the ocean. 

They stumble to a halt, and Khun snorts. “Maybe dancing isn’t for you.”

Bam panics. They’ve only just started! This is the most Khun’s said all night. Anxious to keep the conversation going, he jokes, “No, I’m going to do it. I’m going to become a great dancer, and then we’ll dance our way up the tower, all the way to Jahad.”

Khun stills a bit at the mention of Jahad, but Bam continues. “Maybe every test on the higher floors has a dance element,” he muses. “Like, maybe this floor is tango, but the next one is…” he searches for another dance, “...dogtrot or something.”

“Foxtrot.”

“Foxtrot,” Bam repeats, and almost steers Khun overboard again. Khun guides them back safely to the center of the pier. “Maybe the final floor isn’t a battle at all. Maybe it’s just a giant ball.”

Khun is quiet. “You have to lead,” he says, but it’s hard to lead when they’re so close, when their bodies are almost flush against each other, when Khun’s words are just quiet murmurs in his ear. It’s hard to do anything but follow in Khun’s wake. How had the ghost pulled off an attempted stabbing like this? Bam is unmoored by just the touch of Khun’s hand on his shoulder blade. 

“Aren’t I hard to follow?” he asks absently, eyes trained on his feet, cautious of stepping on Khun’s toes or dunking him into the ocean. He’s awful at leading. It had so much nicer, being shuffled around the dock while Khun led, paying no mind to where he put his feet. 

“You are.” Khun’s feet slow to a halt, and after a moment, Bam looks up at him, curious.

Khun’s expression is unreadable. 

Bam is aware, then, that they aren’t talking about the tango anymore. 

That’s the trouble with Khun, sometimes—that his thoughts go sharper and quicker than people can reasonably keep up with, and so they often go unspoken entirely. Being Khun’s friend is like being part of a secret Bam’s not privy to, and most of the time it’s impressive, it’s endearing, and Bam respects it—

— but right now, it makes him afraid. “Will you still follow?” Bam asks, not really sure what he’s asking, but still hoping Khun will say what he wants to hear.

Khun doesn’t. Instead he says, “I'll try to.”

The fun tension from earlier evaporates immediately. It is replaced by the urgent feeling again, the feeling of running on borrowed time, and it steals Bam’s breath, steals his calm. “That’s not a yes,” he says, and the words come out harsher than he means them. Harsh from fear, but nonetheless harsh. His grip on Khun’s shoulder suddenly seems too tight, not tight enough. Not tight enough to stop him from leaving. 

Khun’s expression freezes over. “It’s not,” he agrees flatly. His hands drop away from Bam to hang limply at his sides, and fear converts to frustration—he is so quick to distance, so quick to leave. He imagines a Khun who lingers, a Khun who laughs, a Khun who trusts enough to race his friends into the dark, and it only aggravates the absence of him.

And then frustration flares into anger—anger that the easy intimacy from earlier is gone, replaced by this sick, sour feeling in his stomach. Anger that Khun had danced for what felt like an eternity with someone trying to stab him without complaint, but can’t do the same with him—Bam, who is not interested in stabbing anybody, not interested in anything but Khun’s hand upon his. Anger that an absolute stranger gets intense stares and close embraces and—and Bam instead gets this: Allusions to being abandoned. A precursor to being left, a prelude to desertion.

I’ll try to sounds a lot like no. 

And that realization makes the anger crumple back into fear, and then melt into tiredness. 

Shh, shh, whisper the waves against the shore.

He is always like this—forced into frustration in the face of his own helplessness, in the face of his own wants. He chases things, breaks things, sets things on fire, as if doing that will get him what he wants.

It doesn’t get him anything. It gets him pushed into oceans and pushed off train stations. It gets his friends injured. It gets Khun all cold and expressionless. It pushes him away.

But it is the only thing Bam knows how to do.

He suddenly regrets asking Khun to dance, regrets this whole conversation. He would have been content to never learn this fact—that it is possible to feel this lonely, standing right in front of the person he is lonesome for.

“Okay,” Bam says weakly. They had been standing just inches from one another, but now Bam takes a step back. Now that he’s paying attention, out of his trance, he realizes he can hear Shibisu’s laughter and Rak’s rumblings all the way from the pier.

“They’re celebrating,” he feels himself say, nodding towards the patio. His mouth fits itself around the words without thought; his mind is just a spectator. “And they asked for you. We should head back.”

“Okay,” Khun agrees, and Bam hears it for what it is—confirmation of Khun’s refusal, affirmation of this distance. The tango, the touching—all of it a fluke, and over now.

They walk back to the patio in silence.

If the rest of the team notices that something is wrong, they don’t betray it. Shibisu slings an easy arm around Khun. Hatz pushes a cup of sake into Bam’s hands. And when Khun tilts his head back in laughter at something Ran says, when he bares his throat to the moon, pale and unmarked, Bam carefully does not look.

That night, Bam dreams. 

The girl with the red hair and red lips against a backdrop of licorice-black, whispering words into the shell of Khun’s ear. In the strange space of his dreams, she morphs into him—Bam’s face, Bam’s body, hovering at Khun’s back, angled over him, holding a dagger to his throat. 

This is what you do, the illusion whispers. This is what you do to the people you love. This is the only way you know how to keep them. 

He blinks, and in the next instant he’s back on the battlefield, staring down an army of thousands. And he knows what’s coming next, feels his mouth form the words without the permission of his mind, but Khun doesn’t hear him. 

Fire. Entire waves of it, greedy for kindle, latching onto soldiers and clinging to them. Figures writhing and contorting in it, changing shape, twisting and pulling. 

His friends are dying. His side is losing. And there is someone in front of him, walking into the flames.

And then—the embers that rain, the gold that isn’t gold, but ash. It surges through his body, white-hot, even as fear twists in his gut, even as he cries for it to stop. It burns and burns and burns, and when it stops burning there is nothing. There is just himself, thirty-thousand feet in the sky on shinsu wings, on wings made of souls. They hiss at him. Monster, they say. Monster. 

He blinks, and the ghost appears again, in his shape, that insinuation of Jyu Viole Grace. Its features have morphed into Bam’s so much that he can’t tell himself apart from it anymore. It’s different from looking into a mirror. It’s as if the image is a part of him, branched off from his body in disgust, so repulsed by his thoughts, by the core of him, so selfish and wanting. 

Poor thing, it tells him. Don’t feel so guilty. Weapons don’t have to feel guilty. 

He feels its breath curve around the shell of his ear the way it must have curved around Khun’s. The thought makes him sick, makes his body burn. “I’m not,” he insists. “I’m not a weapon. It’s—the Thorn is only a part of me, I—”

His own face stares back at him. You, it says, are not greater than the sum of your parts.

All around him, the world burns.

Chapter Text

The poets, Endorsi thinks, get love all wrong. Or, at least, the poets have clearly never had to climb the tower. 

Love, this big, selfless thing. Love, this dramatic epiphany. The moon gets involved. The sun gets involved. Everyone and their grandmother gets involved. Or so the poets think, only they’re wrong, because that kind of thing doesn’t last long in the tower. No one has ever made it up the tower this way, sustaining themselves on flower shop encounters and long looks from across a room, burning themselves alive with their want. 

Flirting—that’s different. Flirting is a game, and going on dates is a game, and she’s not allowed to have sex, but if she were, then that’d be a game, too—a kind of push and pull, an exploration of want, all of its topographies and boundaries. How much can she take from someone, while giving as little of herself as possible?

Because it’s always something. They always take something from her, unwilling as she is to give it, and that’s what the poets get most wrong. All this giving, all this self-sacrificial bullshit, as if someone could give and give and give and then just die one day and be done with it. As if all that giving and dying didn’t take the other person with them. As if self-sacrificial love weren’t the most selfish kind of love.

Bam had bought her lunch that day on the test floor, had delivered her a plate of pasta and had taken a piece of her with him when he left. And then there’d been Isu and Hatz and Anak, and she wanted to slap them sometimes but they were hers , they had made themselves hers, and so she had become theirs.

The day she lost her name to Kaiser on the Name Hunt Floor, she’d walked back to their safe house and said, as coolly as she could manage, “You guys go ahead. I’ll figure this out.”

Isu had looked at her, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“This is my problem, not yours.” She folded her arms. “It’s my name. I can get it back on my own.” 

Hatz had looked offended, and Isu had looked like he wanted to say something too—but before either of them had a chance to, Anak stepped in and delivered a truly impressive backhand across the face, livid. 

Endorsi held a hand to her cheek and swiveled back to face her. She was not in the mood for this. “This face,” she snapped, “is a national treasure.”

Anak didn’t dignify that with an answer. “We’re stuck with you,” she hissed, sounding very pissed off, “so act like it.” 

And Endorsi had listened between the lines, and found worry and love there. Had listened between the lines and heard, You’re ours.  

And she’d understood, then—that maybe she’d taken a piece of them with her, too.

Clearly Bam and Khun—whatever is going on with them—haven’t gotten there yet.

It’s morning again, and they’re gathered in the dining area while Khun delivers his daily briefing the way someone might talk about paint drying. Bam sits and listens attentively. Neither of them looks at each other.

The air hangs sharp and heavy as an impending slap.

Endorsi takes two minutes to prop her ankle up on a chair and keep it elevated, and spends the remaining seven minutes watching them skeptically. 

She has eyes. She saw what happened, the day of the ambush. She knows both of them, and so she knows that there’s—something. There. Something she’d prefer not to think too hard about, for reasons she’d also prefer not to think too hard about. But something.

And Bam is a movie star hero, cute and noble and totally lacking in common sense, and who can blame him if he believes the poets and all their bullshit about love, but Khun. Khun should know better.

When the briefing ends and the team disperses, Anak elbows her and mutters, “Did they fight or something?”

“Poetry,” Endorsi says, enjoying the inside joke. She casts another glance at them, still not looking at each other, still quiet and yearning, and she smiles thinly. “Just leave them to it.”

Anak gives her a knowing look, but mercifully doesn’t say anything, and—well. No one’s going to write poetry about it, but that’s probably a kind of love, too.

Endorsi elbows her back.

One, two, three, four, Bam counts, watching his feet as he goes. Step, close, step, close. Change weight. Five, six, seven, eight. 

He gets his feet crossed on the last couple of steps, and scowls. Behave, he thinks at them sternly, and gets ready to start again. One, two—

“Bam?” 

Bam yelps and trips over himself. He swivels around mid-stumble to face Shibisu, standing confusedly in the doorway of his room. 

“What…” Shibisu blinks. “What are you doing?”

Bam feels his face heat up, and says quickly, “Practicing. Did you need something?”

“Yes,” Shibisu says slyly, loping into the room and plopping down on Bam’s bed. “A better explanation.”

Bam shifts from his left foot to his right, doesn’t make eye contact. “Khun’s teaching me to dance.”

Shibisu’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead. “O- ho.” 

Bam scowls. “What?”

Shibisu grins, then fakes a shudder. “That’s nice of him. But—Khun as a dance teacher. Yikes. I mean, I’m sure he’s good. But scary. But good.”

“I don’t think I’m much of a student,” Bam mutters.

Shibisu peers at him curiously. “Why are you learning, anyway?” 

Bam considers the question, considers the things he could say. That a tango is a conversation in eight beats. That, at night, when the sky is dark and the ghosts are quiet, there is a part of himself that whispers, Maybe if you learn to dance, you could ask him to stay. 

And then, a cheekier, more inane part of him that pipes up, Maybe if you learn to dance, he’ll hold you closer. 

He says none of this. “No reason.” He smiles a little. “Just seemed fun.” 

Shibisu gives him a long look, and doesn’t look even a little convinced. “So things are good between you two, then?” he says casually. “Because it kinda looked like you weren’t talking to each other.”

Bam shrugs. It feels more like a muscle spasm. “You don’t talk to every person, every morning,” he points out, and it feels like a good point—he’s pretty proud of it—but Shibisu only crosses his arms pensively, unconvinced.

“Yeah, but this wasn’t that. This was the silent treatment. I could tell.” He points to his face. “Can’t fool these eyes.” 

Shibisu grins at him, and Bam snorts despite himself, folding himself into the armchair next to the bed. “We talked last night,” he admits. “It didn’t go well.” 

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” He looks down at his hands, wringing them in his lap.

But Shibisu doesn’t seem offended. Just leans back against the headboard and settles in.

They sit together in silence for a few moments.

Then, finally, Shibisu says, “Sometimes, words are hard.”

Bam looks at him curiously. Shibisu is carefully observing a spot on the ceiling. “Like, I really want to tell you guys about my dreams,” he continues. “Honestly, I don’t even know why I haven’t. And the longer I hold out on you guys, the more you’re gonna hype them up, and they’re not even that interesting. They’re pretty boring, as far as nightmares go. No one’s pushing me off a cliff or stabbing me during dances.

“But sometimes words are hard,” he repeats. “And then it’s like, the longer you wait to say them, the harder they are to say.” He taps the side of his temple. “Khun has that problem a lot. But you knew that. He’s only mouthy with stuff he doesn’t care about.”

Bam thinks back to last night. Khun, who—for all his quick words, his silver tongue, for all he talks circles around anyone and anything—had spoken so indirectly, so faintly, that Bam hadn’t been sure what they were talking about at all. 

He’s still not sure he understands. But maybe that’s on him. 

“You have that problem too,” Shibisu continues lightly.

Bam shoots him a wry look. “I know,” he says. It’s why they’re stuck on this floor in the first place. 

The memory of being left, anchored in fear and anger. The memory of that tango, anchored in jealousy. He knows that much about himself. Or, at least, he’s learning. 

It’s a weird thing, feeling seen. The way Shibisu looks at him, it feels like— Oh. There you are. 

He’s not used to it. He’s not sure he likes it, not sure how he feels about someone else seeing him, when he’s not yet sure what’s there. But that’s probably on him, too.

“It doesn’t sound like you have a hard time with words,” he says instead of any of this, aiming for humor and landing somewhere tired. 

Shibisu sighs, obliging to the blatant redirection. “One of these days, I’ll tell you,” he promises. “About the dreams and stuff. Why I’m climbing the Tower. I’ll tell you guys.” 

“You don’t have to,” Bam starts, but Shibisu only reaches over, pats him on the back goodnaturedly. 

“I want to,” he says. “It just might take a while.” He throws his arms up in the air. “And that’s okay!” 

Bam thinks about that. Shibisu waits him out patiently, until finally Bam says, “What if you don’t have a while? What do you do then?”

The corners of his eyes crinkle. “Then you go and say what you can.”

Bam folds his hands in his lap, keeps his gaze turned downward. “What if you already did?” he asks softly. “What if you get it wrong?”

Shibisu beams at him. “Then you dust yourself off,” he says, “and try again.”

Evening approaches quickly, and the ghost of Hwaryun doesn’t go away. 

Khun had thought, at first, that she was something like Bam’s vision of Rachel—a one-hit wonder designed to frighten and then melt away. But the manor seems to be taking more of a long game approach with him. 

Tonight, she walks in step with him as he and the team make their way to the ballroom. As usual, no one else sees her. 

What would you do for him? she asks.

He ignores her, ignores the unsettled feeling in his stomach, and keeps walking. He has always hated the way Hwaryun asks that question—like it’s a test she already knows the answer to, and she is waiting for him to get it wrong. Khun has nothing to prove. Well—he has plenty to prove, but nothing to prove to her. And even less to prove to an illusion of her, manufactured to scare him.

He pushes open the double doors, and stops. Behind him, the team falls into abrupt silence. 

Blue, blue as far as the eye can see. Every single person in the ballroom has blue hair. Siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, familiar and unfamiliar faces—an amalgamation of his and Ran’s memories, reconstructed with painstaking accuracy. 

Behind him, he hears Ran exhale sharply. 

“Khun, is this…” Shibisu starts, but then a young woman steps into view and curtsies politely in welcome. 

Even from the corner of his eye, Khun recognizes the motions, the lightness of her steps, the shape of her curtsy. They have been picked from his thoughts, dreamt from his dreams, and so he doesn’t need to hear her speak to recognize who she is. He knows. But then she speaks anyway.

“Aguero,” she says, and Khun’s blood is suddenly—too hot, too cold. Rushing, then frozen, then rushing.

This isn’t real, he thinks, and takes a second to school his expression into one of disinterest before he speaks, but even that second is too much—even that second has given himself away. He has always been porous against the presence of her. She leaches through him. But still, he asks, “And who are you supposed to be?” 

This isn’t real. 

But.

“Aguero,” she repeats, gentle and fond. “My Aguero.”

That familiar lilt, that soft cadence, molded from his memories and resculpted with regret, painted into a nightmare. She is wearing the same shimmering gown from that night, draped in rainwater and frost. Maria. 

Bam steps up to stand next to him. “Khun.” His voice is tight. “Maybe we should…” 

“No,” Khun says. 

The illusion of Hwaryun lingers at Bam’s shoulder, invisible to everyone but him. It smiles at him, serene and sly. What would you do for him? she repeats.

He steps grimly into the ballroom.

It’s alarming that the entire room is filled with Khuns, but more alarming still is the fact of what it does to their Khuns—to Khun Ran and Khun Aguero Agnis, whose expressions and postures recalibrate slowly but perceptibly, whose quiet steps bring them forward and into the crowd like a pair of compass needles being tugged north. The crowd engulfs them in the way that the horizon swallows the sun. 

Endorsi, maybe, is more used to this sort of scene—but the rest of them are openly gawking, silent and staring. They’re the only quiet ones in this sea of Khuns—tall and short, smiling and scowling, only united in the color of their hair and the threat hiding behind their teeth, seeping into the corners of their smiles, as they glide around making small talk.

Bam almost wants the dancing to start just so they’ll go away—but he guesses this is the point. It’s not supposed to be fun, or comfortable.

“How are there so many of them,” Endorsi mutters, and Anak mutters something back, but none of them are looking away from the center of the room, where Khun and Ran are surrounded by blue-haired relatives clamoring for their attention.

There is a tall woman who Bam recognizes as Khun Maschenny—Maschenny Jahad and Ran’s mother, whose entire presence gives off the feeling of coming too close to exposed wire. She speaks to Ran in low tones, a low hum of electricity—but her laugh flashes like lightning, and the sharpness of it makes Bam wince in memory of her daughter, unhinged and vicious and also terrifyingly competent. She is here too, surely—Maschenny Jahad, somewhere waiting to be found. Kicking puppies in the meantime, maybe, or murdering innocents in the dark. Bam would like to think so out of spite—the memory of what happened to his master is still blood-fresh in his mind, will always be blood-fresh in his mind—but unfortunately there’s always been a method to her madness. Even if the method is, itself, a want for madness. 

The faces are more solid tonight. They’d been only suggestions of faces the last few nights, but tonight they’re vivid, almost real. If the last few nights have been dreams and memories and nightmares, then tonight is—well. Maybe not movie-quality, but coming close. Maybe an old film, with a couple of fuzzy scenes and staticky visuals. Maybe one of those old records like the ones his master likes to listen to, the ones that sound like a warm memory of something you’ve never experienced but can start to imagine, this is what it must feel like to love and be loved, and there are a couple of skips in the record but that’s okay, you can fill it in, you can extrapolate, because it’s too sad otherwise—to leave gaps in all that love.

Khuns fill the ballroom like an ocean, and at Khun Aguero Agnis’ side there stands Maria, unshakeable and ever-present, like the foam that follows the sea. Khun makes a point of not acknowledging her. He stands in the center of the ballroom like an island, and when the music finally starts, rich and dark, the ocean parts for him. Everyone parts for him, except Maria.

Maria stays.

And Khun, never slow on the uptake, steps back to bow to her and extends a hand. They make their way to the center of the room, and it’s like her feet don’t touch the ground—like she’s walking on something soft and invisible that the rest of them can’t see. The illusion is more solid tonight, looks more real, looks stable— but Maria, amidst all that, is soft and dreamy, like an out-of-focus photograph. Gaps in her love, for someone to fill.

Bam watches, deeply confused. He’s heard stories of Maria—what Khun told them on the Hidden Floor, small mentions here and there. He’s never tried to put a face to the name, and Bam really hasn’t met that many Khuns, but the Khuns he has met have all been sharp and biting. They have all had steel between their teeth and blood on their hands. 

Maria doesn’t.

The tango, he realizes immediately, doesn’t suit her. He sees it as soon as they start moving—the way she seems to soften at the edges, the way she seems to melt into the air. There is something viscerally present about the tango—Khun’s hand had felt like a brand on his shoulder, last night on the pier, but Maria looks like she’d dissolve at the touch.

The pier. Khun, amused and confident and sure. And then—none of those things. 

I’ll try, he’d said. 

Not an answer. Not a yes. But a lot better than whatever Bam’s been doing. Words are hard, but what has Bam been doing? Throwing tantrums. Breaking things. 

A tango is a conversation in eight beats.

The slow drag of their steps, the intimacy of their tango, in all its serpentine, flicking unrest. What are you talking about? Bam wonders.

As if hearing his thoughts, Maria speaks.

“We last danced,” she murmurs, “on the eve of the princess competition. Do you remember?”

When Khun responds, his voice is toneless. “You’re not real.”

“I’m as real as your memories of me,” she points out gently. Bam doesn’t catch the look she gives him, only sees its reverberations on Khun’s face—only sees him look away. “Do you trust your own memories so little?”

Khun doesn’t acknowledge the question. “Where’s Kiseia?” he says instead, looking around the room. “Isn’t this whole farce designed to torture me? Shouldn’t she be here?”

“Kiseia was here briefly,” Maria murmurs. “But I thought she might make you uncomfortable. So I asked her to leave.” 

Khun’s hand, which had previously rested lightly on her back, now clenches the fabric of her gown. The airy fabric scrunches in his grip like a cloud. “You asked her to leave? Where is she?”

“Well taken care of,” she assures him. Her next words knock the breath right out of him. “In the company of your sister.”

Khun’s sister, Bam knows, is dead. 

And Khun—freezes. 

“What does that mean?”

“I’m sorry you haven’t repaired your relationship with her.” She sounds terribly sincere, terribly gentle. “I know how much she meant to you. I saw you on your runs with her, sometimes. When we were little. You used to sneak off into the forest at dawn.” She smiles up at him. “I used to wake up at dawn to watch you.” 

“Where’s Kiseia?” he demands. “Where’s Agnis?”

Maria says nothing, and after a moment, she smiles. “This isn’t quite right, is it?” she asks, curving into his touch. “This isn’t how you remember me.”

Then she laughs, and it’s an airy sound, shimmery and not quite there. And then it makes sense—the otherworldly way in which she carries herself, that almost painful gentleness, so soft around the edges as to be inhuman, so as not to be real. She’s not real. This is only how Khun remembers her. Love, filling the gaps of her. Despite everything.

The understanding of it aches.

As if bending to Khun’s memory, the music molds itself into a delicate waltz. Khun looks at her, stricken, but his hold adjusts instinctively, and Maria, too, readjusts herself—and then they’re waltzing, gliding across the floor, weightless and untouchable.

This. This suits her. Suits, at least, Khun’s memory of her. The longer they waltz, the more Maria’s silhouette solidifies, like the fog is being lifted from her. The details of her make themselves gradually visible: the hem of her dress, fluttering and sheer, rising like smoke at her twirls. Her hair, falling in a curtain at her back, the individual strands lovingly recreated. The sharp line of collarbone, collecting shadows the way water collects in tide pools. 

And the realer Maria becomes, the less real Khun appears to be, far away and fairy-light and on another plane entirely, some dream world where no one else exists. Where his team is the dream and Maria is reality. 

Bam finds himself wishing that they would tango after all, if only to maintain the illusion of Khun being here still, within reach, even if he’s not... his.

Maria can have the tango. She can have the press of Khun’s hand against her shoulder blade. She can have the length of Khun’s leg, can run the instep of her heel up the fabric of his trousers. She can have those things, Bam decides, as if those things were his to give—they’re not, but she can have them, she can have them so long as Khun stays. So long as she doesn’t waltz him away.

Once again, Khun disappears after the ball. Once again, Shibisu sends Bam to find him. This time, Bam starts with the dock.

A sight that is rapidly becoming familiar: Khun, backlit by the moon where it floats on water. 

For a few seconds, they just look at each other silently. There are too many thoughts—they claw their way up Bam’s throat, then dissolve on his tongue. They come in all colors. Are you okay? Why do you look so hunted? What can any of us do, to make it go away?

Bam holds the clearest of those thoughts behind his teeth. Rolls it under his tongue like candy. Feels it melt.

There is the familiar frustration—of something rising, something bubbling, and not knowing what it is or how to control it. Words are hard, but somewhere in the back of his head, he’s starting to understand that this isn’t enough. It’s not enough to feel this way without understanding it. It is not enough to grab onto someone and demand that they stay. Girls dissolve into gold that way. Boys climb out of lighthouses and walk to their deaths that way. But it is still all Bam knows how to do.

So this time, he doesn’t do anything.

There is something in Khun’s expression too, conflicted and unsure. Khun doesn’t seem to know what to do either.

They don’t talk about why Khun is on the dock again, alone and bruise-blue. They don’t talk about their argument the night before. They don’t talk about Maria. 

There is something between them, and it is soaking up all the words. 

Then Khun extends a hand, smooth and practiced, bows slightly at the waist. His hair falls over his eyes when he inclines his head, but then he looks up through his lashes and smiles, a little wry, a little tired. 

“Dance?” he asks. When Bam just stares dumbly, Khun elaborates, “We never finished our lesson.”

A tango is a conversation in eight beats.

It’s not a solution. But maybe it’s a start.

Bam doesn’t wait to be asked twice.

“The ghost last night,” Khun says, apropos of nothing. “The one you asked about. What it said to me.” 

Don’t, he had whispered. 

“It asked if I’d rather dance with you. It asked if it should go get you.” He sighs, and smiles wryly. “I said no.” They’ve stopped dancing, but he doesn’t let go. Just holds Bam there, a breath away from his heart. 

Time slows.

“Oh,” Bam says, softly. He doesn’t let go either.

They stay like that for a long time.

On the walk back to their rooms, everything goes to shit. 

They’re all chatting about this or that, tired and pleased and slightly wine-drunk, when Rak sniffs the air and announces, “I smell smoke.”

Hatz gives him a skeptical look. “Why would there be smoke here? Was someone using the kitchen?”

But Bam smells it too—the faint smell of something burning. It doesn’t smell like kitchen smoke. More like campfire smoke, maybe, only they’re indoors, and—

Khun breaks into a run. “The kitchen’s all the way back there,” he shouts back at them. “The smoke’s coming from one of the bedrooms.” 

It’s Anak’s room. It burns so fiercely that none of them can get close. The inside of the room is completely alight. 

“Do you think the manor will sue us for property damage?” Shibisu whispers. 

“Well, fuck,” Endorsi says succinctly. “Enjoy sleeping outside tonight, niece of mine. How’d this happen? Did you leave a hair straightener plugged in or something?”

Khun looks thoughtful. “There’s something odd about this fire,” he says, and exchanges a look with Shibisu. “Why isn’t it spreading?”

“Isn’t that good? Do you want it to spread?” Rak demands.

Shibisu snaps his fingers. “Khun’s right! The walls and floor and whatever are all wood. If the fire in Anak’s room is this bad, the whole manor should’ve burned down by now.”

“Good riddance,” Ran mutters. 

Through all this, Anak stares at the room as if in a trance, shell-shocked, unmoving. Then, abruptly, she starts walking forward, one dazed step at a time—and then she breaks out into a run.

“Anak!” Shibisu yelps. “Get away from there!” 

Anak ignores him. “ Mom!” 

Endorsi has to jump on her to pin her down. The rest of them hurry over to help. “You moron! Stop struggling!” 

Anak gives no indication of hearing her. “Mom!” she screams, even as the smoke makes her eyes water. She screams between coughs. “Mom, Mom!” 

“What’s Lizard Turtle talking about?”

“It’s the manor,” Khun says quietly. “This isn’t real.”

“It feels real,” Bam observes, holding a hand out to the fire. 

“Another shared hallucination,” Shibisu agrees, wincing. “The manor’s probably showing Anak her mom in the fire.” 

“My sister?” Endorsi grunts, narrowly avoiding Anak’s elbow while she thrashes beneath her. “In there? Why? Anak, stop!” 

A vision of her mother, in her room, burning. Alive? Horror flutters like a ribbon in Bam’s throat.

“Her parents died in a fire.” Khun’s voice is cool and clinical. “This is what she remembers. Or imagines.”

“Then why are we seeing the fire too?” Endorsi asks. 

And then there’s no time for conversation, because Anak throws Endorsi off and dives straight into the fire. 

“Anak!” Endorsi sounds terrified. Her voice shakes. She tries to step into the room, but the flames rear higher as if to keep her out. Sparks and embers land on her skin, her hair. She winces, but doesn’t step back. “Come back!”

Anak doesn’t answer. “Damn it,” Shibisu grits, staring at the wall of fire. It’s impossible to see into the room anymore, let alone get inside the room; just standing near it is painful. Bam’s eyes and throat are burning from the smoke alone. “How do we put this out?” 

Khun is already rolling up his sleeves. “I can heal myself with the fire fish,” he says grimly. “I should—”

Bam grabs Khun’s arm. “Wait,” he blurts. Khun turns to look at him in surprise and confusion, and Bam flinches guiltily, tries to explain—then finds that he can’t. Finds that he is unable to verbalize the mantra in his head.

There is a ceiling above his head and it is made of stone. There is a girl pinned beneath him and she is dissolving into gold. 

There is a boy next to him and he is walking into fire. 

“Fuck,” Endorsi hisses. She sounds like she’s crying. “Get out of my way!” 

And then she lights up Bong Bong and flies straight into the wall of flames. 

Hatz reaches to grab her, and falls just an inch short. “Endorsi!” 

“Endorsi!” 

Khun pulls his arm out of Bam’s grip and takes a few quick steps back, as if to get a running start. 

“I’ll go,” Bam offers urgently. His heart is pounding. “I can be in and out of there in a second with the Th—”

“You stay where you are,” Khun snaps, and lowers his knees like he’s about to make a run for it—

—but then Endorsi shoots back out from the fire a second later, coughing violently, covered in smoke, embers still alight in her hair. She is carrying badly burned Anak, who is somehow still thrashing in her hold. 

“Endorsi, Anak, holy fuck,” Shibisu gasps. “You’re fucking insane.”

“Let go of me!” Anak screams.

Endorsi looks done. Furious and terrified and done. With ash and saltwater running down her face, she snarls, “Like hell! We’re fucking stuck with you , so act like it! You’re ours!” 

And Anak—doesn’t stop struggling, exactly, but pauses long enough to look at her, eyes wide and red-rimmed. It’s enough time for the rest of them to rush forward and hold her down. Khun pulls out the medical supplies, Shibisu finds a fire extinguisher, and between the six of them, they manage.

By the time they finally put out the fire, the room has burned down entirely.

They stare at the ashes in exhausted silence.

“Do you still see her?” Endorsi asks, funeral home soft. Her voice is scratchy from screaming.

Anak’s expression is shuttered. Not haunted, not angry, not sad, not anything. Her burns are already healing, but she is ragdoll-limp in their hands, a chalk outline of a person. Bam gets the impression that she’s not really there.

“No,” she says.

Khun dreams, that night, of running in a race.

It’s not unlike the races he was made to run as a child—spectators lining the stands, shouting and jeering. Himself in one lane, surrounded by faceless co-competitors on either side of him, dressed in shades of blue. Breathing heavily, lungs burning, eyes focused on a ribbon somewhere further forward, too far away to see. It is knowledge by fiat—no real assurance that the finish line is there, besides the thought that it must be so, that somewhere, somewhere, the rat race ends.

Of all the games in the Khun Family Death Olympics, the races were the worst. The most symbolic, and therefore the least dignified—a gaggle of children who didn’t know any better, running endless stretches to chase after some ribbon so far away that it might as well have not existed. And none of them would have known otherwise, waiting at the start line. There was only the thought that the ribbon was there, that it had to be there, because what else would be left for them, if it wasn’t? What other purpose could there be for them, if not the pursuit of this ribbon? 

The Khun children, for all their brutal efficiency and cold realism, were only followers of faith—lived their lives only by fiat. They ran, because that was all there was—chasing this ribbon, this promise of their father on the other side. They ran because they were still in it, because the race was still going, and while they were running they were useful , they were watched, they were wanted. But that was the great paradox of it. Their lives started and stopped in the race, in the liminality of it, and in chasing it, they also chased its end.

So Khun ran, but never too quickly; he chased, but never too feverishly. Always aware, keenly, that the point of the race, the point of faith by fiat was to die for it. And that he hadn’t found anything worth dying for yet. 

But this dream, this race—is different. 

He sees the finish line as soon as he steps up to the start line, a faint line in the distance, faint but there, and something in him just… knows.

As he starts to run, the world shifts, building and falling away again as if he’s running through a movie of himself. The first few paces take him into the Test Floor, and he runs in and out of it without a look back—his best friend, vanishing into the deep sea. Climbing floor after floor with his murderer, and that anger pushes him forward for a while, makes his body work a little harder, makes his legs move a little faster. 

A quarter into the race, the world remolds itself again in the shape of Arlene’s Hand. Dark and cold, something forbidden in the air. The wrong person wants him there. The wrong person wants him out. It’s a trap, and when he hears his name in that voice, his entire self stops and starts. 

He is so tired, so breathless that all he can manage is Bam’s name aloud, but even as the building collapses he’s running—even as the rubble takes him he’s moving, breathing in ash and stone dust and chasing, still chasing, always chasing. 

He is about halfway into the race when he stumbles, and in the moment it takes to fall, the world crumbles away again. When he blinks back into himself, he finds himself on the Hidden Floor, curled on the ground, curled around the bomb in his chest.

It’s not pain, not really. It starts as only a sudden blurring of the heart, as if a giant paintbrush has pierced his chest and smeared its inner walls with white . The pressure urges him to collapse into himself—and so he does, crumples to the ground like foil, all shine and no substance. There are voices running to him, and then the pain starts—a firework in his ribcage, his heart unfurling. And simultaneously with the unfurling comes the understanding, blurred by the pain but ever present—that the finish line is approaching.

And still, he runs and he runs and he runs, this stupid race, this great paradox, and he finds, wretchedly, that he doesn’t want it to end at all. That he still wants to be useful, watched, and wanted—that he wants the race to last just a bit longer.

Absently, he knows what comes next: two years of being in the dark, out of commission, trapped in a glass box. And absently, he knows that Hwaryun can’t be here, on the Hidden Floor. Can’t be here, on his father’s floor. That none of this is real.

But in this dream, there she stands—watching impassively as he breathes, as he exhales the life out of himself with each step. Vivid red against the light, like a splash of blood on snow. 

And in this dream, on this race track, she asks him, slow and intentful, What would you do for him?

He understands, has always understood that it’s not a question. Understands from the downturn of her mouth that it is only an observation—something she is disappointed but not surprised by. A test he fails, over and over.

But deterministic questions beget deterministic answers, and Khun has never had patience for rhetorical questions.

Die for him, he thinks, even as his heart constricts, even as his blood freezes to ice. He is running and dying all at once; he is the racer and the frozen and the bleeding and the buried. He is all the versions of himself, dead and alive and dead and alive and dead and dead and dead. 

He has died so many times. What’s one more? What else is there?

But then the world shifts again.

The cold rushes out of him, as if he’s run past it, replaced by a scalding heat. Too much of it—fire lapping at his skin, singeing his clothes. He was too cold, and now, suddenly, he burns. 

A little ways in front of him, he sees Anak’s room.

His steps don’t falter. The room inches unfailingly closer, and the air around him grows steadily warmer—hot until it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open, to remember to breathe, to put one foot in front of the other.

But then—

Wait, comes Bam’s voice, urgent and afraid. A hand wraps itself around Khun’s arm, tight as a tourniquet. In the corner of his eye he sees Endorsi, trembling and crying sooty tears, streaking her face like warpaint. A watercolor of fear, painted by Anak. But Khun has painted worse.

And he notices, then, that there’s something off about this race. That there are no cheering or jeering spectators. That it’s not just him, alone on the race track, gasping for breath a few steps from the finish line. That there are no faceless co-competitors in the lanes adjacent—only his friends, Rak and Shibisu and even Hatz, falling further and further behind, watching him with wide and terrified eyes.

And that—that can’t be right. That can’t be what this is supposed to be. 

He remembers then, unbidden, another kind of race, before he’d been old enough to really care about princess competitions or Death Olympics. Sneaking away from the house while their parents were still asleep. Dashing into the forest at sunrise with Ran and Kiseia and his other cousins, clumsy and stubby-limbed, still growing into their bodies. Never pulling too far ahead, never letting anyone lag too far behind. Running, because they were together, and they could. Running without finish lines.

Those sunrises had felt special—fresh with the start of everything, the promise of everything to follow. Running on those mornings had felt like running into the universe, exploding and endless and effervescent. It had felt like running into forever.

I don’t know if I’d trust anyone to run alone into the woods with me now, he’d told Bam that night on the dock, but that wasn’t quite right. It was never about trust, back then. Kiseia and Ran and the rest weren’t there because he trusted them. He’d trusted them because they were there—co-conspirators in the great paradox, running not for him or against him, but with him, drunk together on fireflies and wildflowers and cotton candy light, the way only children could be.

And then his sister had died and Maria had left, and nobody had been there for a long, long time. 

But now—

In the moments before he wakes, Hwaryun finds him again, standing alone on a race track and in a forest, the two at once. 

She whispers, What would you do for him?

And Khun finds that he isn’t sure anymore.

Bam’s not really sure what it is that makes him sneak out of the manor at the crack of dawn. Shibisu and the rest tend not to wake until late, and Bam usually stays indoors and meditates until they do. 

But this morning, while the world is still dark, he puts on his shoes quietly and slips outside. There is a hint of dawn on the horizon, light spilling into clouds and into water like pink lemonade. He walks towards it. 

It’s a little chilly. It smells like pine and morning dew, and it hangs in the air, shimmering as he walks. The world is still mostly asleep, this early in the morning. 

He hopes Endorsi and Anak sleep in. They didn’t speak a word to each other last night, after the fire. Endorsi led Anak silently to her own room, and then the rest of them separated with a few tired, muttered goodnights. 

The night feels faraway now, a blurry haze of adrenaline and fear, spiked in all different directions. His friend, who’d run into the fire. His friend, who’d watched her run into the fire. His friend, who wanted to run into the fire. All that screaming and crying, everyone afraid of everyone else leaving, and leaving first themselves.

He doesn’t remember the specifics of what Endorsi said last night—only remembers that it had sounded mean, and that it’d made Anak stop in her tracks. It had meant something to her. It had made her understand.

He walks a little faster.

There is the sound of waves crashing near the dock, and he intends to head there, to throw his shoes off again and sit at the dock by himself, but then, from the corner of his eye, where a small forest meets the clearing, he sees a figure.

Khun stands there, in front of the forest, surrounded by morning mist. It makes him look gentler at the corners somehow, like someone has blurred the sharpness of his edges with water and air, soft where it touches him. 

The strange atmosphere from the night before still hangs between them, washes between them in waves. But in the morning light, it takes on a different color. 

“Morning,” Khun says, sounding awkward. Uncomfortable. “I didn’t think anyone was awake.” 

“I wanted some air,” Bam mutters, also uncomfortable.

“Me too.” Khun nods in the direction of the forest. “I was going to take a walk. For old time’s sake.” He says it wryly, sounds like he doesn’t expect anyone to understand at all, like he’s going to leave right now. He’s always looking to leave. Bam wishes he’d stay.

What if you don’t have a while?

Say what you can, comes Shibisu’s voice. 

What if you get it wrong?

Dust yourself off, and try again. 

Bam takes a breath, and says to the grass at feet, “Then do you want to go for a run? Together?”

A brief silence. Then: 

“...do you want to?” Khun asks.

Bam looks up again, curious at his tone. Once again, he wonders what they’re talking about—wonders if the topic has changed again, like that awful night on the dock, without his knowledge. But—“Yes,” he says, earnest. “I asked.”

Khun stares at him. He looks disbelieving. His face does something complicated that Bam can’t follow—a thousand things in a second, shadows on changing waters that settle slowly, surely, incredibly into—“Okay.”

Bam feels his face light up. “Really?”

Khun quirks the corner of his mouth up in a tiny smile. “Sure,” he says, a little wonderingly, like he’s trying the word on for the first time. “I’ll even race you.”

Bam feels something fill him. A nameless glow that is becoming less and less nameless. It spills from his heart and ripples through the rest of him, burns in his nose, in his throat, behind his eyes. It grips him with tight, hopeful hands. When he repeats, “Really?” his voice brims with it.

Khun stares at him. And then, confusingly, wonderfully, he starts to laugh. A small thing that glitters and grows until he’s doubled over, his cackles a clear cut through the fog. 

Bam watches, baffled and stupidly relieved.

This is a new memory, anchored in something soft. Anchored in a glow. Anchored in—anchored in... 

Gradually, his laughter quiets. He takes a couple of steadying breaths, his mouth still wearing the outline of a laugh. When he’s gathered enough of himself to speak, he looks at Bam and says, amused and assuring and only a little hysterical, “Really.”

And then—without a word of warning—he takes off running, sprinting straight into the woods in a blue blur, a streak of ocean water against a backdrop of forest and sky.

He’s fast. 

Bam stares after him, too dumbfounded and dazed to do anything but drink in the scene, until Khun spins around to face him again, jogging in place. He’s still smiling. “Are you coming?” he calls.

Are you coming?

Bam just stands there for a few seconds, afraid to move—absurdly afraid that if he moves to follow, Khun will step back and disappear again, an afterimage that darts away from direct viewing.

But slowly, disbelievingly, he lets himself follow. Goes from faltering steps, to a tentative jog, to an earnest sprint, and then he just runs and runs and runs.

Khun watches him expectantly, and waits.

He waits.

And Bam starts to think that this glow, this nameless feeling—is not so nameless after all.

Chapter Text

There are ten minutes between late afternoon and evening—ten minutes of true dusk, in that breath of space just before the sun truly sets. In those ten minutes, the sky is playful: blush-shy when Khun looks, and setting only when he turns away. When he was little, before he was old enough to know better, he would play traffic games with daylight, and they went like this: Red light. Green light. Red light. Green light. Come and go. That was how the game was played. 

But even back then, it’d felt more like this: Red light. Red light. 

Stay, stay.

It’s a young man who opens the ballroom doors for them tonight, which wouldn’t matter especially, except the young man looks exactly like Michael.

He approaches them dressed in a hooded cloak, hanging low over his head, obscuring the top half of his face in shadow. “Good evening,” he says smoothly, and gestures for them to enter. “I’ve been waiting.” 

Ran stiffens as Michael pulls back his hood, and Bam remembers belatedly that Ran had been a part of Khun’s team back then—the one Michael had infiltrated and picked off.

He only knows what he’s been told, but he knows enough—that Michael had been sent from FUG, had schemed with Rachel to murder his friends. That he’d nearly succeeded with Khun that day on the 28th floor, leading him into the trap at Arlene’s Hand; and then again, on the 52nd floor, playing that stupid game of keepaway with Doom and his brothers.

And he knows—that these illusions are manifestations of memory, nightmares personified, and so the look on fake-Michael’s face… that must be based in some kind of reality. Khun must remember this expression from somewhere. Among the seven of them, locked away somewhere, there is a memory of Michael looking at him this way. Obsessed and starving.

Michael catches Bam looking, and smiles. 

The ballroom is darker tonight—only barely lit by candlelight, dim and flickering. The music, too, is softer—a black velvet kind of sound, soft and crooning. The entire room is blanketed in a kind of shadow, beckoning them gently to enter.

They make their way inside in silence, staring at Michael’s back, and Bam knows that they must all be wondering the same thing: What will it be tonight?

Khun is the only one who doesn’t look anxious or pensive—only resigned. His mouth is set in a grim line, so taut that Bam thinks it might snap if he moves. But when Michael turns to them, bending at the waist in a bow, Khun hesitates too. Thinking. 

After a moment, he turns very slightly to Bam and says, quiet and sure, “I’ll be back.”

Before Bam has a chance to ask what he means, Khun steps forward, and follows Michael to the center of the ballroom. As with every night, the music rearranges itself, and the hands on the grandfather clock start ticking.

A tango is a conversation in eight beats, and true to his words, the dances each night have been colored differently—the violence of the tango with Jyu Viole Grace, the yearning in the waltz with Maria.

If the tango the first night had sounded like war, then tango tonight sounds like poison—sounds like dark glances from across the room, sounds like want flirting with murder. They are a breath apart from each other, and it occurs to Bam, then, that there’s really quite a lot contained in the distance between them. Close enough to touch, but not touching. Close enough to do all manner of things—to make someone love you, or to make them bleed.

So much achievable, from this distance.

The violin swells into a question, plaintive and pleading, and he watches as they rock into each other lightly, moving without moving, weighted into each other like a pendulum. Then they walk, silent steps around the room, and Bam can’t help it—he tries to catch his gaze, tries to make eye-contact. It takes a few steps, but Khun seems to notice, and Bam’s blood roars as Khun angles towards him, as he turns his head just so—

—and then Michael eases his leg between Khun’s and uses his foot to push Khun’s legs apart. Like flicking a switch, like a flower unfurling, Khun startles back into the dance, legs still intertwined with his.

With that move, something changes. Something about the way they hold each other, something about the way they move. He squints, can’t make heads or tails of it—and then Michael seems to cue a turn, and it hits Bam in one go. Khun isn’t leading anymore.

He watches, nervous and agitated and inexplicably fascinated, as Michael guides Khun’s steps, as Khun reluctantly gives himself over.

This, then, is what Khun looks like when he follows. Weightless, lithe, coy. Embellishments so clean and nimble that it’s all Bam can do to admire them before Khun has already moved onto something else, following faithfully where he is led. When Michael abruptly leads him into some weird quick-stepped turn, Khun adapts without a hitch. When Michael takes an abruptly misplaced step, Khun readjusts and throws in some fancy footwork that makes the whole thing look dazzling and deliberate to begin with. Sharp, polished.

Anxiety spikes in Bam again, only this time he recognizes it for what it is—not anxiety, but jealousy. An unhappy sort of want—for a Khun who dances with him, step for step. A Khun who promenades his way back to him, even if he sometimes twirls himself away.

Extend a hand, bow at the waist or curtsy, and that’s all it takes to ask someone to follow you, to trust you, to stay with you. Bam knows, now, how to ask someone for a dance.

But how do you ask someone for a life? 

In the center of the ballroom, Michael looks over Khun’s shoulder and looks in Bam’s direction again. “Like this,” he says. "Let me show you."

Bam freezes. A deer caught in the headlights. 

Can he—did he—

Khun looks up at him in alarm, and Michael pulls something out of his cloak, and—

A flash of green, a bloom of red.

From this distance—enough to make someone love you, or make them bleed.

Khun stumbles backwards with a loud huff, like the breath has been knocked out of him. But it’s blood that’s been taken from him, not breath, and even as the fire fish hurries to make itself known, there is red pooling on the ballroom floor. Bam stares at it, still frozen.

“What the fuck,”  Shibisu is shouting. Rak is hurtling towards Michael in a mad dash, and no one is stopping him. Even Ran’s face looks dark.

Michael watches them placidly. He’s holding a long green spear that Bam recognizes as belonging to Baylord Paul. “You were wondering what it looked like,” he laughs. “You wanted to know.” He vanishes neatly just as Rak reaches out to grab him, and reappears at the opposite end of the room. A ghost, only there to haunt. “So I showed you.”

He gestures at Khun, who is crouched on the floor, breathing laboriously and pressing a hand to the giant slash across his torso, as if that’ll staunch the flow of blood. The fire fish is closing the wound surely, but slowly. Red still falls in rivulets to the floor.

It’d happened in a second. They’d all known something was coming, they’d all been waiting for it, and still—

“Come back, coward,” Rak roars.

“Wondering what? We weren’t—” Endorsi sounds nervous. “Who are you talking to?”

A smile spreads across Michael’s face like an oil spill. He says, “All of you.” 

After the dance, in the privacy of his room, Khun ruminates.

His clothes were bloodstained and in tatters, but for the first time all week, he had walked away from the ballroom feeling—calm. Satisfied. Feeling as though something had changed.

It was not a sentiment shared by the other members of the team, who’d all looked varying degrees of shaken, angry, and guilty. Shibisu had refused to meet his eyes, and Hatz’s mouth had been a razor wound on his face . Rak, for his part, had grabbed Khun by the bloody collar and snarled, “Have you lost your bananas, Blue Turtle,” and who the fuck knew what that meant?

“Well, I’m back, aren’t I?” Khun snarked.

At that, Bam, who’d been staring in a trance at the unfortunate puddle of blood on the floor, suddenly snapped to attention. He looked at Khun for a long, long moment, as though trying to piece something together—and then, coming to an apparent conclusion, nodded at him once.

And Khun thought—that maybe Bam had understood what he was trying to do. That maybe they were getting somewhere.

Afterwards, rather than run off alone to debrief on the docks, Khun had followed the team back. None of them were in the mood for their usual post-ball festivities, which meant Khun had trudged back to his room in tense silence with the rest of them, but maybe that wasn’t so bad either. Maybe that meant something, too.

Now, back in his room, Khun starts undoing the buttons of his bloody shirt. The room is cold, with the only window facing west, and he supposes that’s intentional—the way it looks and feels identical to the window of his childhood bedroom. A quiet reminder of what it means to be a son of Khun—to be dusk and not dawn; to be a little bit lonely, a lot of the time. Loneliness is a fog to live in, and so it’s enough to not be lonely now, to have something to struggle for now, even if it’s short-lived, like a patch of winter sunlight. There are so many Khuns who will never have even that much.

The fog really isn’t so cold if you grow up in it.

A series of loud thumps on his door interrupts his thoughts.

“Knock knock coming in,” someone says, all in one breath, and that’s all the warning Khun has before the door to his room swings open.

Khun is still peeling off his shirt when Shibisu walks in. He looks nervous, uncomfortable. Khun already knows what this is going to be about. “Yes?” 

“Look at you,” Shibisu says, his mouth in a flat line. “For fuck’s sake, Khun.”

“Look at what? I’m fine.” Khun gestures at himself. Fully intact. “See?”

“You’re covered in blood!”

“My shirt is,” he corrects, annoyed. “And I’d have changed out of it already, if you hadn’t barged in just now.”

“Are… are you fe—”

“Just spit it out.”

“It was me,” Shibisu blurts out, all in one go, and winces. Then, guiltily, “I was wondering, while you were dancing, how it happened. What he might do. And then he—” 

“It wasn’t you,” Khun says curtly.

“He sai—”

“I heard him too. But it wasn’t you.” Of course everyone was wondering. And of course the manor ghost would say what it said—would dive into everyone’s thoughts and slam them with guilt where it hurt. It was what he’d do. 

The dances each night had been annoying in their own ways—had each existed in their own set of epistemic possibilities. But with Michael, there’s only ever been one.

Shibisu is silent for a long moment, working it out. Then, finally: “You knew it was going to happen from the start,” he says slowly, “didn’t you?”

Khun ignores him in favor of changing out of his shirt. Shibisu continues, realizing. “The attack,” he says. “You’ve never had an encounter with Michael that didn’t end in your getting stabbed somehow. Last time you saw him, Baylord Paul cut you in half. You knew that the manor knew that, and so you knew what was coming today as soon as you saw Michael, and then you walked into it anyway.” 

Absurd, that this is turning into an accusation. “I’m fine. I had the fire fish.”

“Yeah, because it didn’t kill you.” Guilt forgotten, Shibisu’s voice starts to climb. “And not for lack of trying! You would’ve been screwed if the Michael-imposter had actually gotten you. I’m pretty sure the fire fish doesn’t bring back dead people.” At Khun’s dark look, Shibisu holds his hands up. “I’m just saying, some of us could really do without seeing you get eviscerated, like, all the time. You could’ve told us. For the record, it’s hard on us, too. You should know that by now.” 

“Know what,” Khun says, wholly disinterested in this conversation.

Shibisu’s voice takes on a strange tone. “Dying is a really selfish thing to do.”

Khun pauses, too, because oh.  

He’d done intensive background checks on every single person he was acquainted with, after the incident with Michael and Apple. He is perhaps the only one on the team aware of what happened to Shibisu’s friend. Quick to ally, quick to smile. Khun has his guesses as to what Shibisu’s dreams are about. They’re probably not too far off from his own.

Shibisu watches him earnestly, and Khun sighs, a little defeated.

He has been made aware, recently, of his own tendency to run into fire. But—“I know how it looks.” His mouth tightens. “It wasn’t like that, today. It’s not like that. Not anymore.” I’ll be back, he’d said, and it’d been a promise. He just wasn’t sure what the promise was for.

“What’s it like, then?”

What would you do for him, Hwaryun whispers.

This is what Khun believes in: The uncertain tickle in the back of his throat. The answer that tucks itself behind his teeth, under his tongue, lingering and stage-shy.

Red light, red light. Stay, stay.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m trying to figure it out.”

They stay like that for a little while, silent and thinking. 

“You make everything so hard on yourself, sometimes,” Shibisu finally says. “Sometimes I don’t even know how you’re still standing.” He sounds a little fond, a little exasperated. Mostly—sympathetic. Like he understands. 

Khun thinks that, of all people, maybe he does. Shibisu, made to watch his friend die in front of him. Shibisu, forced to lead a team up the Tower after Khun left with Rachel, guarding his secret alone. Shibisu, still laughing and joking and everbright. Still here, still trying. 

And Khun is just—tired. He’s so tired, and it’s dark, and it’s late, and it’s Isu—so he drops all pretense. Balls up his bloody shirt in one hand, and rests his cheek in the other, propping his elbow up on the table. “I know,” he says, letting all the exhaustion and longing seep into it, “but here I am.”

Shibisu stops, and stares. He does a double-take, blinks at Khun like he’s not sure he heard him correctly, and when Khun only blinks back, something in Shibisu’s expression lifts.

“Yeah,” he says, a little surprised, a little wondering. “Here you are.”

Khun arches a tired eyebrow at him, but Shibisu doesn’t bother explaining—only beams, looking stupidly pleased. He smiles like Khun has hung the moon for him.

After a moment, Khun smiles back.

Sleep takes Bam as soon as his head hits the pillow.

His dreams are varied things. Slow and murky some nights, dark paints mixing in oil. Shadows that consume, that bite for keeps, that make him bleed black into the night. On other nights, his dreams are light and breezy—nothing more than the sensation of ocean air chasing itself in the creases of his clothing, through the strands of his hair.

But each and every night, his dreams are fixed in the remembrance of something. The remembrance of loss, of losing. Sometimes passive, sometimes active—sometimes he is left. Sometimes he is the one who makes them leave. The knowledge reveals itself to him in metaphor. Gold light for Rachel, deep sea currents for FUG. Every sensation a simulacrum of something else. There is so much, in a moment. All the colors and thoughts in the world compressed in a moment, compressed in a phrase, compressed in a voice.

For premonition, there is this—the degree of the slant in Khun’s smile, the quiet in his voice, the set of his shoulders underneath his jacket. A backdrop of screaming, running, razing fire. Technicolor vivid, anchored in fear. All of that in a glance, in a moment of thought: I’m being left, again. 

Dark caves and dissolving gold, tangos and fires. There are so many different ways to leave.

But—

But then there had been that extended hand on the dock. That mad dash into the forest—Khun spinning around to peer at him, waiting. There had been Shibisu in his room, slapping him warmly on the back. Endorsi, fetching Anak from the fire.

Khun had walked away from them today, had danced a velvet tango and made a decision that’d left him in a pool of his own blood. And Bam had stood there and watched, helpless and wretched. 

But then Khun had returned. Bloodstained and worse for wear but there, in the only way that’d mattered.

I’ll be back, he’d said, and Bam thinks that maybe there are a lot of different ways to stay, too. That there are different ways of coming and going, of receiving and rescinding love. All manner of ways, that might not require any sort of razing at all.

Something in him quiets.

The voice that narrates his dreams reconstructs itself in his likeness. This is all you are, it says again in his voice. More weapon than human; not greater than the sum of your parts. 

But that can’t be. 

How can it be, when he’s so consumed by guilt, this proof of his humanity—proof that things shouldn’t be this way, that he’s done something wrong? Wrong, because he can do right. Proof that there is more to him than this—the Thorn fragments that feed on his anger, the souls that feed on his desperation.

And how can it be, when there’s all this—all of Shibisu’s bright laughter, Rak’s deep rumblings, Endorsi’s teasing lilts—all of them warm. Those nights on the dock, under cotton candy skies that melt into moonlight. Khun’s hand over his shoulder blade. Those long, lingering steps, the scrape of their shoes on the boardwalk. The brush of Khun’s hair over his ear while they dance, cheek to cheek. Racing each other in the woods, chasing mist and sunlight and—and something he knows the name of, now.

He holds those moments close to his body like a heat pack, curls himself into them like a hearth, and waits until the voice slinks away.

In the last moments of his dream, the fire from the ambush comes again, as it always does—the raining embers, the gold that isn’t. The rush, the blackness taking control of his body. He loses himself to it, as he does every night—constant and inevitable.

But this time, in between the blackness and the aftermath, just before he gives himself to the dark, he thinks, No.

Bam wakes up abruptly.

The world is still pitch black, asleep. Images from his dream play out in his mind like a slideshow. He checks the time and sees that it’s almost three in the morning.

He swings his legs over his bedside and just sits there, for a few moments—on the edge of his bed, staring into the dark. Thinking.

Then, slowly, he stands. 

The carpet is soft under his feet. He opens his bedroom door, then walks barefoot into the hallway, as if in a trance. 

The hallway is dark and silent, save for the sound of his steps—soft footfalls on quietly creaking floorboards, warning him at each step of what he’s about to do.

He stops at Khun’s door. It’s wooden and old-looking, and in the dark it seems to ask, Are you sure?

Bam knocks on it. When no one answers, he knocks again. 

There’s a loud and abrupt thmp, like someone jolting up, followed by the sound of rustling, someone swearing, then hurried steps, then—

The door swings open in a hurry.

Khun blinks at him, wide-eyed. His hair is a mess. His sleep clothes are wrinkled. He’s not wearing shoes. There’s a pillow mark on his cheek, and Bam wants to smooth it away. “Bam? What’s going on?” he asks. He looks around the empty hallway, and doesn’t see anything. The alarm fades into confusion. “Did something happen?”

“My nightmares,” Bam blurts. 

Well. He’s gotten this far.

“I dream about the Outside,” he says. “The cave Rachel found me in. And Rachel, too.” Words are hard. They feel like brambles in his throat. He drags them out, one by one. “I have nightmares about her—pushing me away. The deep sea fishing test. The train station.”

Khun’s brows knit together. “Bam…” 

“I dream about our friends dying, sometimes. Sometimes because I lose control, like the ambush. Sometimes I’m the one that kills them.” He shifts from foot to foot. “Other times it’s just someone with my face.”

Khun looks pained, but he doesn’t interrupt. Stays standing out in the dark hallway, barefoot and dressed in pajamas. Bam is stupidly grateful for it. Somewhere deep down, he is aware that if he stops now, he might never get it out again. So he keeps going.

“I dream about the people you dance with,” he confesses. “I dream about you.”

Khun freezes. “Don’t,” he says, his voice tight.

Don’t. Khun had hissed that to the ghost whispering in his ear, the ghost of Jyu Viole Grace. 

It asked if I’d rather dance with you. It asked if it should go get you.

And Khun had said, Don’t. 

“Why not?” It comes out like a statement instead of a question, sharp and short, because he knows why. That tango with Michael had shown him why. The ambush, the fire, all of it. I’ll be back. That had to have meant something. He needs it to have meant something. “Is it because you don’t want me to? It’s okay, if you don’t. But I don’t think that’s it. That’s not how you act.” He swallows. His hands dangle uselessly at his sides. “I’m not blind.”

Khun’s face goes blank, goes unreadable, and for a second Bam wonders if he’s going to get the door slammed in his face, but then: “It’s not worth it,” he says flatly.

“What’s not worth it? This? Me?” Bam looks at him in the dark. “Or you?”

Silence. 

He shivers, and Khun must think it’s from the cold, because he mutters, “Come on, let’s talk inside.”

It’s not that much warmer in Khun’s room, which shouldn’t come as a surprise—Khun has always had an exceptionally high tolerance for the cold. Bam curls up on one end of the couch. Khun sits too, leaving a wide berth between them. It’s not a big room, but the space between them feels massive. Feels terribly lonely. “Aren’t I important to you?” 

Khun looks taken aback. “Of course you are.” 

“Then why do you keep trying to leave?” he asks bluntly.

Because—Khun knows. He must know by now. Must have known before Bam had even started to realize that there is something here, something between them, waiting to grow. Tucked patiently away in the core of himself, waiting to be noticed—all of this love. 

Khun lifts his chin. “I’m not.”

“But you’re not trying to stay,” Bam points out, softly. 

Khun seems unmoved. “There are things you want to do,” he says, as certain as Bam has ever heard him. The words sound practiced—like pieces of a conversation he’s had with himself before. “Things that I can’t help you with by staying.”

“Like what? Like the fire in Anak’s room? Like the ambush?” Raining embers, the gold that isn’t. The familiar rush of fear. He forces it down. “Those are all things we could’ve done together. All of us.” He tries to keep his tone level when he says, “No one on this team needed you to do them alone.” 

“And what would’ve happened if I hadn’t?” Khun bites. His voice rises. “We let the squadron take us? We let you do everything? What’s the point of having a team if you’re the one who has to put out the fire for us, each and every time?” 

Bam could throttle him. “I put out the fire because you walked into it!” 

“Then let me,” Khun snaps back. “I’m the lightbearer. It’s my job to know when I need to walk into fire.” 

“It’s never your job to walk into fire!” Bam hisses. “I’m not an altar for you to sacrifice yourself on! Why does anyone have to walk into fire?!”

Khun looks at him for a long moment. There is something complicated in his voice when he says, “The world burns for you. That’s just how it is.”

And—well. Bam doesn’t know how to parse that, doesn’t even know where to start. He has never claimed to understand the world, has never really understood what it wants from him or what his role in it is. 

But he thinks of dark nights all alone with FUG, thinks of that evening at Arlene’s Hand, thinks of sinking sinking sinking into the deep sea. He thinks of how, after years in the darkness, writing off everything he wanted and loved, Khun had been the one who had planned and plotted and pulled him back towards light, towards life, towards blue. He thinks of Khun’s hand on his hair outside the Nest, gentle and heavy, anchoring him to his personhood. Khun’s hand on his shoulder blade at the docks, guiding him away from midnight water and back onto solid ground. Khun’s voice, soft and warm in his ear, reminding him of his humanity.

And he says, “But I burn for you.”

Khun falls quiet, and so does he, not quite regretting what he said, but thinking that—that maybe they are both a bit frightened by how much Bam loves him.

Raining embers, a wildfire that razes. Unkept and uncared for, that is the form it takes, spiraling into loneliness; but Bam aspires to something better. He has seen what it could be instead, in small snatches and glimpses, those nights on the pier—a hearth to be nurtured, gentle and steady and fire-warm.

He wants it so badly. He wants—he wants.

And, because he is not a weapon, because he is more than the sum of his parts—

He takes Khun’s hand, lets his body convey what his words can’t, bares himself helplessly open, technicolor-vivid. Remember this, he thinks. The degree of the slant in his smile, the earnestness in his eyes, the rise and fall of his chest, soft and tidal like the waves they’ve danced to.

Bam doesn’t know how to say more than what he does—but that’s okay. What he has is enough. It just needs to be said. He has to try.

“If you love me,” he starts, and almost flinches at the way Khun whirls to look at him, almost flinches at those eyes—blazing blazing blazing blue. 

If you love me— it’s a lot to presume, but Bam doesn’t think he’s presuming. Not with the way Khun’s hand burns in his, not with the set of Khun’s mouth, taut with secret thoughts and wishbone words. He lowers his voice, tries to speak to Khun the way he’d speak to something cornered and afraid. Tries to summon the feeling of Khun’s hand on his shoulder, grounding him, guiding him home. “If you love me,” he tries again, gentle but firm, “then stay.” 

He’s not good with words, will never win an argument against Khun with words. He can’t weave tapestries of language to hide behind like Khun does, can’t talk circles around people until they’re dizzy. 

Words are hard. But it was never about the words. It’s never been about the words.

Khun stares at him, looking—surprised. Shaken. Seen. 

And slowly, slowly, he says, “Okay.”

The word is settling and electrifying all at once. Bam stays still for a long moment, waiting for it to settle. Khun, too, seems mystified, disbelieving.

But that’s okay. Time is, suddenly, a friend. There is the rest of forever to convince him of it.

Carefully, tentatively, he reaches out a hand towards him. Khun’s eyes are a little wider than normal, but otherwise his expression is quiet. Bam doesn’t know what his own looks like. Probably breathless.

There is a stray strand of hair, longer than the rest, falling into Khun’s eyes. Bam smooths that away first, tucks it behind his left ear.

Khun lets him, and the awareness of that—the weight of the permission he is being given—is staggering. But Bam presses forward.

He follows the angle of Khun’s cheekbones with the palm of his hand, and brushes a thumb under Khun’s eye. He imagines rubbing away the circle there, the shadow, the scar of sleepless nights.

Then he smooths his thumb downward, so that it grazes the corner of Khun’s mouth, rests in the dip of his lips. Bam swallows. He could live and die here, in this one stretched out moment, in that dip, and not want for anything else. But he keeps going.

He follows the slope of Khun’s jaw downwards, reaches the incline of his neck.

Tell me , he’d imagined saying, before you leave me. It feels so long ago now. 

There is so much to say, so much he doesn’t have the words for. But— a tango is a conversation in eight beats, Khun had told him. Bam hadn’t understood, back then. But he's learning.

And so, thinking of those slow, lingering steps on the pier, he drags a light fingertip along Khun’s throat, traces an invisible scar.

Khun’s fingers wrap around his wrist. Bam freezes, his eyes still fixed on the line of Khun’s throat. 

“Bam,” he says hoarsely, and oh—that is what his name feels like in Khun’s soundwaves, that is what his soundwaves feel like on Bam’s skin. The feeling ripples from his fingertip to his finger, reverberates up his arm and sinks into the rest of him, and Bam is heady with it. His arm feels weak, feels soft and ticklish and numb in its wake.

He looks back up. Khun’s eyes are dark, darker than he remembers them. His lips, slightly parted, closer than Bam remembers them. That won’t do. Bam wants to remember this. He wants to light every other memory out of himself with this one alone—this memory of dark eyes and parted lips, technicolor-vivid. He needs to anchor it in something. In touch, maybe.

From this distance , Bam thinks absently. From this distance.

He leans in.

Afterwards, when they look at each other again, faces still flushed—in the whisper of space between their bodies, Bam confesses, “I dreamed about this, too.”

Khun’s expression is absent, vacant, like he’s not really there. Like he’s not sure this is real. “Dreamed about what?” he asks.

Bam twines their hands. “This.” And then, with his free hand, gestures vaguely around them. “This. And—” He hesitates, embarrassed, then is embarrassed by his embarrassment—after everything, this shouldn’t be what finally does him in. 

So, just as he’d seen Maria and Michael and his own ghost do, just as he’s wanted to do every night on the pier—he throws his arms around Khun, loops them over his shoulders, and tucks his face into the crook of his neck. “This too,” he says softly, against Khun’s throat.

Khun goes very still, as if about to pull away. But then Bam feels the light pressure of Khun’s hand on his hair, moving downwards gradually, his fingertips trailing the bare skin on the back of his neck.

He shivers. Khun smells like water, like morning dew. His hand comes up to rest on one of Bam’s shoulder blades, and Bam wonders if he, too, is thinking of silent tangos on the dock, of wild sprints into the forest.

When he falls asleep again, it is to the breaths that he takes, measured against Khun’s heartbeat. 

He dreams, again, of raining embers and wildfire-rage. A cocktail mix of fear and frustration churning in his body, irrepressible. His subconscious reminds him that this dream always ends the same way—with everyone dead except for him.

But then someone shouts, “You have to stop!”

It sounds very far away. He tries to ignore it, but then he hears it again. “Bam, stop!”

There is an underwater quality to the voice—dimensions all stretched and misshapen, outlines blurred and dark. No discernible words—just soundwaves, warped from abuse in their journey to get to him, desperate to be acknowledged, but nothing of themselves left to recognize. 

But this time, Bam recognizes them. 

It’s just his name—but the cadence of it is unmistakable. He has felt the soundwaves of his name in Khun’s voice on his skin now, has felt them reverberate through his fingertips all the way up his arm, into his spirit. They have been carved into his body. He will never be satisfied with anything else. He will never be fit for anything else.

He closes his eyes, and lets them wash over him, lets them keep him company. They are here now, and they are enough. They have to be enough, because they belong to the only person who has ever looked at him and seen a human. The only person who has seen him for more than his power and his fate and his teleology, and wanted him anyway .

That person puts a hand on his shoulder, gentle but firm, and says, “Stop.” 

So Bam lowers his arm, and stops.

And the world stops burning.

If anyone notices Bam sneaking out of Khun’s room at six in the morning, they don’t say anything—but Shibisu does give him a knowing, shit-eating sort of grin at breakfast, which Bam staunchly does not acknowledge. 

And anyway, they have more exciting things to think about—like the message Khun had woken up to that morning from Hwaryun. 

Be ready to leave, tomorrow midday.  

“Thank god,” Endorsi grumbles. “My ankle’s killing me.” 

Anak gives her an unimpressed look. “Serves you right for running into a fire.”

Endorsi looks like she might like to strangle her. “You ran first!”

“My ankle was fine,” Anak points out, smug. 

Shibisu looks heavenward. Bam thinks he might be praying for strength.

The day passes in a quick blur, chased by one thought: It’s almost over. One more night. One more dance, and it’s over. 

Bam trains, and meditates, and when evening finally comes, he almost shoves past the team to force open the double doors himself, eager to get the whole thing over with. “Calm down,” Hatz tells him, but there’s an undercurrent of amusement in it. 

“Can’t blame him,” Anak grunts. “I’m ready to get out of here.” 

Shibisu thumps Khun on the back. “Go get ’em, boss,” he says cheerily. 

In perhaps the biggest indicator of team morale, Khun doesn’t even tell him off—just gives him a halfhearted sort of glare and reaches for the door. 

Before he can touch it, however, it opens on its own.

On the other side of the door stands Rachel, her hands folded behind her back, looking like the most harmless girl in the world. 

“Great,” Endorsi deadpans.

No one seems especially worried, and Bam thinks that maybe he shouldn’t be, either—they’re not on the Hidden Floor. This ghost isn’t backed by a splinter group of FUG. And Bam knows that Rachel, alone, has never had any real power. 

But she has always been exceptional at manipulating others into letting her borrow theirs.

Khun steps forward. “You’re going to dance?” he asks mildly. “Are you sure your legs can handle that? Do you want me to find a chair for you?”

Rachel’s voice is low, soft. “So pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

No one answers, and Rachel doesn’t try to fill in the silence. It lingers, oppressive and stifling, for several long moments. Finally, she murmurs, “I hear you’re leaving.” Her eyes turn to Bam. “I guess you think you’ve won.”

Bam says nothing. 

“But I’ve been watching, all this time. Waiting for my turn,” she continues. She rocks on her heels, looking thoughtful. Her words take on an edge—the hint of mania that Bam has come to expect from her, when her calm starts to fray. “It started with me, you know. I wanted it to end with me, too.” 

“God, even the fake version her is fucking insane,” Endorsi grumbles. 

Khun crosses his arms impatiently. “Let’s get on with it, then.” Rachel steps aside agreeably, and they make their way into the ballroom.

He realizes immediately that something is off.

The lighting, the guests, the furniture. The ballroom had been so vivid that first night—had represented itself in different colors and accents each night thereafter. But tonight the colors seem a bit too garish, the furniture a bit too simplistic. The guests, too, seem more like faceless mannequins than ghosts—stilted, smiling props. The whole thing looks different, somehow. It looks like a dollhouse. 

It looks fake.

“I thought I’d do something special for our last evening together,” she says, gesturing at the ballroom. “Save the best for last.” 

Endorsi sneers at her. “What can that possibly mean, coming from you?”

Rachel hums. “You must all think you’re so special, being so secretive about your dreams. But you’re less unique than you think. You’ve seen the overlap. Michael, yesterday. The dances. The Khun Family, Jyu Viole Grace, Anak Jahad, and so on. What’s the point of being so guarded, when you’re all afraid of the same things?

“But the best part.” She claps her hands together. Her lips quirk up ruefully. “The most vivid part. Weren’t you curious, why you dreamt about it each and every night, and never saw a thing about it? The scene that each of your dreams always ended in—didn’t you notice?”

The walls of the ballroom start to fade, crumbling like ash. Larger chunks, then smaller and smaller until the pieces are atomic, barely powder, drifting away into nothing, disintegrating into air. So too crumble the curtains, the guests, the candles, the light—as if the entire ballroom itself were nothing more than a clumsily made sandcastle, melting away into the tide. A facsimile of reality. Blow away the sand, and the real structure rests underneath, unveiling itself pixel by pixel, like a newly restored painting.

Bam processes his new reality in pieces, registers the new objects in his ontology like he’s taking inventory.

The floor fades away, to be replaced by air. Tables, scattered around the room, morph into warships. The guests, who had been vague and obscure each night, now sharpen into fierce familiarity, like someone has wiped away the steam on the glass of their faces. Their tuxedos and gowns melt into the uniforms of the royal squadron. Even the dark grandfather clock in the corner, which had tracked their time so diligently, now reshapes itself into a different kind of ticking time bomb—a large ship and command center that Bam remembers quite well. 

He doesn’t need to look down to know that his clothes have changed, too—his black tux and bowtie readjusting themselves around his body to form the red jacket he’d been wearing the night of the ambush. 

The ambush. All over again—Rankers all around, watching them grimly, waiting for orders. Scattered warships, forming a protective wall. And behind all of them, the command center. This, then. This is what they’ve all been dreaming of. 

His heart pounds. He feels his breathing quicken—feels his body freeze. Somewhere, somewhere his mind reminds him that this isn’t real, this must be another illusion, but—

There is so much, in a moment. All the colors and sensations in the world compressed in a moment, compressed in a phrase, compressed in a voice. 

Fall back, and for Bam there is—there are— 

Raining embers. The gold that isn’t. The world in pieces, fading to black, taking him over. Reality, and then a nightmare, and a nightmare, and a nightmare—and now, again, reality. Brilliant and vivid, every detail diligently recreated.

“Shit,” Shibisu says. 

Against this backdrop of Rankers and warships, Rachel dips into a deep curtsy.

“Now,” she says, smiling grimly. “Let’s dance.”

Chapter Text

Things end as they start. For Khun, the start is something like this: A group of friends at his back, ready to fight for him. A woman facing him, colored in yellow, conspiring to take them away from him.

Rachel smiles, backlit by battlefield-fire, and announces what Khun already knows. “Welcome to the final 113th Floor Test.”

He knows, he’d known all along, and so he’s not surprised when his legs suddenly give, when exhaustion crashes into him like a wave. He feels like he’s run a marathon, like he’s already fought half a battle, but that must be the point. “Damn,” he hears Shibisu hiss, out of breath — and that must be the manor’s doing, too. A perfect recreation of that moment: all of them, half-dead and barely breathing, moments before everything had gone to shit.

Rankers surround them, holding their weapons at the ready. Thousands of eyes concentrate on the group of them, aglow with amped power, intent with hunger. It’s like the air in the space is being siphoned away, and the battlefield itself seems to constrict in on him, gold into red into black, pushing his ribs together, squeezing the air out of his lungs. His heart pumps spiders into his veins, and they crawl through the tunnels of his blood in swarms. His body itches with numb anticipation.

The space is perfectly still, but it’s a stillness begotten from tension, so taut that it’s tangible, and a whisper from snapping — into a frantic, frothing frenzy, into fire and blood. The snap is so inevitable that it’s practically already here, and the scent of it laces the air, metallic and burning. And yet no one moves.

Then Rachel lifts her chin in a slow half-arc, her head smugly tilted to the side. And the army of Rankers, in a slow, subtle motion, curves in tandem with her as if they are an extension of her — a serpentine, angular shift, like magnets creeping toward a pole. The effect is almost wave-like — Rachel’s movement, rippling further and further back in layers to the soldiers standing behind her. 

And then Khun understands.

They are her, all the thousands of them — all pieces of her, of this manor, of this floor. A mass of quantum ghosts, waiting for her cue.

“You think you’re so special. You think you know everything. You think you can leave.” Her voice is ash-soft. “What do you really think is waiting for you, up there?” she murmurs. “Do you really think you can take them with you? Do you really think you can keep him?” 

Bam’s expression is hard. Her smile spreads across her face like wastewater. To Khun, she adds — knowingly, tauntingly — “Do you really think you can keep up?” 

“That’s our business,” Bam says. “Not yours.”

“You nearly killed them last time,” she reminds him. Her eyes glint an acid yellow. “What do you think will happen this time?”

Something in the air shimmers, shifts. And Bam, who was about to respond — freezes. Slowly, uncertainly, he lowers his gaze to his hands.

Rachel laughs. “Poor Bam,” she croons. “Always so afraid. Did you really think anything’s changed?”

“God, do you ever shut up?” Endorsi demands. “If you’re gonna keep talking, at least unseal my powers so I can backhand you across the face. How am I supposed to slap you if my powers are locked?” 

Khun realizes it in the second between Endorsi’s question and Bam’s response. There’s an ambush, and they’re supposed to go to battle. This is the Nightmare Floor, the floor of fear — 

— and it’s not the ambush that they’re afraid of. 

The ambush itself had been problematic, but what was frightening was Bam, with his three ignited Thorn fragments threaded through him like marionette strings, and the world vaporizing at a thought, at his touch. And what frightened Bam was himself — the blacking out, the sudden influx of power. The loss of control.

That shimmer in the air had been— 

“They’re unsealed,” Bam says softly. “She unlocked them. I can feel it.”

Everyone turns to face him. 

He’s conjured an orb of shinsu, and it hovers at his fingers, firmly tamped down, weak and small as a pea. He watches it, blank-faced and paralyzed. And Khun understands it. 

What better nightmare than giving him back, in full force, the power that had spiralled out of control and set everything off in the first place?

Except it hadn’t just been Bam, that day, who had set everything off. Khun stares past Rachel to their environs, recreated like a photograph from the day of the ambush — the wall of Rankers, the fire fish, looming over him like a storm. The warship at the very end, hiding the enemy commander. 

The choice had been so obvious, back then. He had walked into the sea of Rankers unflinchingly, with the intention of getting himself captured. It hadn’t even been a question. 

Fall back, he had said, and meant it.

The memory of it blurs into reality now, so intensely that he can feel it — the sick smell of burning, as the fire fish cleared a path for him. The sound of screaming, as Rankers writhed in pain, burning themselves alive, lighting Khun’s way forward like fireflies. His heart, propelled by memory into racing, and now re-etching its racing into memory. Spiders and adrenaline war for purchase in his blood, and distantly he recognizes that maybe the feeling is being augmented by the manor — by this floor. But it doesn’t matter. 

Objective and subjective realities are both still realities. His experiences of them are still real experiences. Real and remembered fears are nonetheless fears. 

And his choices are still his choices.

He turns to Bam. “I can’t promise it’ll be better this time,” he says, blunt. “But I can promise it’ll be different.” 

Bam looks at him for a long moment.

Rak stomps over. “Why are you turtles always leaving me out?” he demands. His tail thrashes loudly. “I’ve been wanting another go at these Squadron turtles.” 

Off to the side, Endorsi scoffs too. “Don’t be so conceited, Khun,” she adds over her shoulder. “This team is more than just the two of you.”

Khun glowers at them. “I’m the lightbearer. Did you forget whose orders you follow?”

“Not yours, if they’re stupid,” Rak booms. “Last time they were stupid.” 

“Well said.” Hatz crosses his arms.

Shibisu stares out at the sea of soldiers. “Well, shit,” he says weakly. “Here we go again.” He makes a show of stretching his shoulders, then winces in pain, and turns to look at Hatz. “I’ll protect you,” Shibisu tells him gravely. 

“Protect yourself,” Hatz says, unsheathing his sword. 

Rachel watches them, unreadable and silent. Khun turns to her. “There you have it.”

She hums back. “You’re wrong, you know. You’re either a liar, or you’re a fool." She almost sounds sincere in her pity. “Remember whose son you are.” 

It’s a good jab. Rachel always has known how to hit where it hurts. And she’s right. Khun is acutely aware, will be forever aware of his birthright as a Khun, and all that it means — all of its loneliness and limitations, all of the leaving and being left. But.

Khun lifts his chin. “You don’t know me.” 

Rachel smiles. “Don’t I?”

She snaps her fingers. 

The taut tension breaks. The string snaps, and silence explodes into cacophony like a firework. Rachel shimmers away into nothing, and the rows and rows of frozen soldiers who had stood stoically behind her now jump to life, charging forward to take her place, their shouts blurring into a roar. 

Shinsu and spears cascade toward them in sheets of light. Ranker upon ranker upon ranker, coming in all at once, from all sides. 

Nightmare melts into reality, and for a sharp instant it pulls him under. The memory of it precipitates into ice in his stomach. The feeling is so cold that it starts to burn, and in that awful moment he remembers — walking into the fire, fading into the black. The taste of ash in his mouth, in the back of his throat. He’s seen all this before. He’s been here before. 

But there’s no time for this. “Shibisu, get back to the ship!” he snaps, calculating their positions rapidfire in his head. Sixteen possible attack strategies. No, fourteen. No— “Hatz, Anak, Ran, Gator—take the flanks. Endorsi, take the overhead. I’ll—”

He’ll do… what?

Bam grabs his wrist, bruise-tight. Khun cuts off and stares at him. 

They stand like that, for a moment of time that they can’t spare. Around them, the world roars and writhes and screams.

Then, slowly, finger by finger, Bam lets go. 

Grimacing, he ignites his Thorn fragments. They pulsate behind him, power running off of them in waves. His wings unfurl too, radiantly white, glowing with the power of his souls. 

“Don’t forget about us,” he says at last, and takes off. 

Khun watches him go. For an ice-clear moment, he remembers the calm of the dock, the crisp briskness of it, and for a moment it breaks him out of this nightmare-induced reality. Reminds him that those moments were real. 

What about us? Bam had asked, all those nights ago  — and Khun had snapped, What about you? 

He looks out at his team. 

There’s Rak, loud and irritating and dependable. Endorsi, aglow on pink wings. Shibisu, clever and absolutely ridiculous, somehow simultaneously panicking and shouting obscenities at enemy Rankers from the safety of his warship. Khun watches them charge, watches them rush forward to defend the little family they had formed on the test floor, the one they had immortalized in writing, anchored in ink and cheap paper— these are my friends. They are mine. They’ve protected me, we’ve protected each other, and they are mine.

They protect him now—they protect each other. Endorsi flits between their side and the army’s, killing them before they even register she’s there, vanishing before they realize they’ve been hit. Anak careens her way through crowds of Rankers like a force of nature. For a moment, Khun just watches, wordlessly.

Rak doubles back, and thumps him so hard on the back that Khun stumbles forward. “What—” he starts angrily, but Rak cuts him off with a jab of his spear.

“Don’t lose your bananas this time,” he roars. “Blue Turtle!” 

And then he’s off again, hurling his spear into a sea of Rankers, who fall in its path like dominoes. 

Khun watches, slack-jawed and slightly outraged, for a few moments—and then remembers himself and looks away, readying his own ice spear.

“That fucking crocodile. What does that even mean,” he mutters, but can’t quite hide his smile.

Once again, there is a wall of Rankers before him. There is the fire fish, looming over him like a storm. There is the warship at the very end, hiding the enemy commander.

And once again there is the thought—that he could try getting himself captured to get to the commander, could walk into the sea of Rankers alone. 

Fall back, he could say.

But—

“A little backup,” he shouts, and Hatz and Ran rush over to support him.

He calls the fire fish back, surrounds himself with its flames in a protective shield. He readies his ice spear. It shimmers in his hold, pleased with his decision. 

Overhead and all around him, his teammates fight, clearing a path for him. He loves them. He would walk into fire for them.

But he doesn’t have to.

What would you do for him, Hwaryun’s voice whispers.

Live, Khun thinks, and charges forward. I will live.

Bam’s first memory of being left is not a memory at all—just the awareness of being solitary, the faint intuition of being unwanted. He hadn’t known the word for loneliness back then, and so the feeling had melted into air, had become something to breathe — something to live in. 

The presence of it still lurks sometimes. Gasoline in want of a spark, to set itself ablaze. 

That’s right, something taunts. Have you forgotten what you are, Ignition Weapon?

It has sounded like a lot of people, this voice. It has sometimes sounded like Rachel, and sometimes like his souls, and sometimes like himself. Right now, it sounds like every voice at once — all the voices he has ever known, calling him: Monster. 

And he knows. For all that they promised each other before the ambush, there are still things in the world that aren’t up to him — things that even Khun can’t machinate. It’s a scary, lonely thought, and it reminds Bam that with or without the manor’s interfering, there is still fear aplenty in him. He brims with it. He doesn’t really think he’ll ever be rid of it.

But that’s not such a bad thing, he thinks. It only matters what he does with it. 

Behind him, Khun snaps out orders over his pocket. Under his direction, Ran electrocutes anyone who gets close. Rak hurls his spear and fells entire lines of Rankers in one go. Endorsi flits through the air while Anak and Hatz clear the ground, fighting back-to-back.

His back covered, Bam focuses on surging forward. And this time, he can see. The Ranker coming in from the left, trying to distract him from the wave controller sneaking up on him from the right. The spear bearer waiting in the wings just behind them. The group of fishermen at the ready. They come at him for slaughter, one after another, an unending and relentless force, but they’re too slow, and he cuts them down easily.  He has never felt so in control of himself, and the knowledge settles in him like water, smooth and cool to the touch.

There will be no raining embers today.

Parry the one on the left, knock her into the spear bearer and half the fishermen. A blast of shinsu is enough to take care of the wave controller on the right—and so he goes, knocking back Rankers like toy blocks, faster than they can get to him. One-two punch after one-two punch.

He’s almost at the command ship when Khun murmurs, voice staticky, “Wait for us. We’re coming.” 

You’ll never keep them, the voice hisses. They’ll leave you like everyone else. 

The voice flips a switch, and for a brief, fierce moment, flashbacks grab him by the ankles, desperately trying to drag him under — back into the cave, the deep sea test, Arlene’s Hand, the train station.

They are awful memories. He has spent years wallowing in them. But he pushes through them, claws his way back up. Reminds himself that, for every dark cave, there has been a cafeteria lunch. For every Arlene’s Hand, there has been a Workshop Battle. For every fall into the deep sea, there has been a tango by the seashore. 

You are always being left, insists the ghost of the 113th floor.

And I am always being found, Bam thinks.

The team joins him in full force—Khun and Rak and Endorsi and Anak and Hatz and Ran, all of them brilliant and powerful and irrepressible, these friends of his, every single one of them aglow.

There is no girl pinned beneath him dissolving into gold. There is no boy next to him walking into fire. There is only Bam, and the people who love him enough to stay.

When they break down the door to the ship, they do it together. When they capture the commander, they do it together.

And when the nightmare resists, when it tries to pull them back in—they snuff it out. Together.

Things end as they start. For Bam, the start is something like this: a dark, quiet space, and the feeling of something leaving, soft and resigned as a sigh.

When the smoke clears, the ballroom is empty again, sparse and old and falling apart. The privacy panels are gone. There are no chandeliers, no decorations. The windows, once gilded with gold, now look like any old windows — creaky, and badly in need of a cleaning. The walls, beautifully patterned just a few moments ago, look old and plain now. The wallpaper, a weathered grey, peels wearily away from the wall like it has lost the motivation to stay upright.

The ballroom is empty, and for once, it feels empty — dark and dusty, with the faint smell of mildew. There is nothing hiding in the silence, nothing lurking in the shadows. The manor, which had been alive and rife with invisible eyes and laughter, now feels as abandoned as it looks, like all the life in it has been blown away with the smoke.

The spell is broken. 

They are wearing their old clothes again — their formalwear must have disintegrated with the other illusions. Bam tugs at the sleeve of his hoodie, and relaxes at the familiar touch of soft cotton — old and threadbare from too many washes, but his. Threadbare with love.

“Is it over?” Shibisu whispers.

“It’s gone,” Khun says, thoughtful. “I don’t think there’s anyone in this manor besides us anymore.”

Shibisu turns wide eyes onto Bam. “Did you, like, banish it?”

Bam shrugs uncomfortably, thinking of the way the ghost had sounded in those final moments — a hundred voices and no voice at all, jumping between modalities. Like it had forgotten what it was. “I don’t think it’ll bother us anymore,” he decides.

They make their way to the double doors. The intricate carvings — fire motifs and half-blurred figures that Bam now recognizes from his nightmares — are still there, etched into the panes. Once upon a time, the shadows and invisible occupants of the manors had made the carvings on the door feel alive, like burn wounds still bleeding. The injury had been too amorphous to touch. It hadn’t known its shape yet.

But now, in this dusty aftermath, without the manor’s interference, Bam sees them more clearly. All the nicks and cuts, the indentations on the two wooden panes of its body, solidified into a topography of its life. The scar of them is starting to fade.

Khun gives the doors a push. They open without much resistance, and exhale gently into the night. 

There is, of course, an afterparty. The kitchens turn out to be much worse-stocked without the manor’s help, but Shibisu finds a few bottles of soju through sheer force of will, and drags them all to the patio. 

The celebrations are still going strong when, an hour or two in, Bam pulls Khun aside. 

Shibisu and Hatz are drunkenly singing into the night, and Rak — not drunk, just loud — is contributing backup vocals. Endorsi and Anak are scolding them, looking pretty red-faced themselves. No one notices as they sneak away, besides Ran, who gives them a look of such bored disinterest that it really shouldn’t count. 

The walk to the pier is silent, but comfortable. Khun ambles alongside him with a hand in his pocket, looking for all the world like he’s just taking a midnight stroll, and maybe that’s what this is, to him — a victory lap in the dark, the floor defeated and conquered. But then Bam sneaks a glance at him and, to his surprise, catches him looking back. And that is a little assuring, maybe — the mutual understanding that there is still something unsaid between them.

“I wanted to show you something,” Bam says when they arrive, and extends his hand, lowers himself into a bow. “I’ve been practicing,” he adds earnestly.

Khun looks — amused. Overwhelmed. But he takes Bam’s hand, settles into the follower position, and then — then they’re dancing, slow and tentative steps. 

Besides that one incident with Michael, Bam has only ever watched Khun lead. Each night in that stupid ballroom, Bam had watched Khun gather the night’s guest of honor in his arms, had watched them bend and twine like willows at the cues of his body, clothed in the sharp lines of his tuxedo. Khun’s left arm, solidly and steadily encircling their waists; his left hand, a gentle but firm presence on their backs. In his right hand he’d held theirs, and when he dipped them, that hand served as a lifeline, even as the curve of their spines arched like a rainbow over the support of his arm, holding them to him even as they fell away. There was something cold about the way he led — expressionless and professional, like holding them intimately meant nothing to him at all. Like he held people like that all the time.

In all of their previous dockside dances, Khun never once dipped him, but it wasn’t so hard to imagine, sometimes, when he recalled Khun’s arm wrapped firmly around the waist of Jyu Viole Grace. Viole’s ponytail ribboning downwards in a stream as the ghost tipped itself back. Khun, eyes trained unreadably on the exposed bend of Viole’s neck, leaning over to meet him, not letting go.

A tango, Khun had told him, is a conversation in eight beats — and on those ballroom evenings, Khun’s conversations had all sounded like look at me, and fear me, and I do not fear you. On the pier, the conversations had sounded like no, and then sorry, and then maybe. Had sounded like I’m trying.

Bam thinks back to all the times they’ve spoken on this floor, those shy conversations each dockside night, spoken in crashing waves and shoes scuffing on the dock. Every conversation, ending on a question that Khun had refused to put to words, a question that Bam hadn’t had the answer to.

All those conversations, dropped halfway—in the aftermath of the ambush, with Khun’s hand on his shoulder and the sky raining embers; on the dock, backlit by the moon while they danced to water; in Khun’s room with a hand on his cheek, Bam’s finger tracing invisible patterns on the incline of his neck. All these memories, anchored in a feeling. Anchored in a person. 

When Khun follows, it is first with a probing kind of hesitance — wary of being steered off the pier again, Bam thinks wryly. But Bam’s been practicing, and he thinks maybe that comes through, too — in the surprised upturn of Khun’s mouth, the slight arch of his eyebrows. 

It’s different, tangoing to say something. He’s mostly still trying to not steer Khun overboard. But it’s a little easier, now, knowing that Khun isn’t going anywhere — that he will match him step for step. That he will promenade his way back, even if he first twirls himself away. So Bam focuses on other things — the touch of his hand on Khun’s shoulder blades, the steps he leads them through, tentative and lingering.

Bam’s not good with words, will never out-talk or out-debate Khun, and that’s probably okay, because there is still this, all of this — so much, in a moment.

Khun slips into every twist and turn that Bam cues, and it’s like he knows what Bam wants before Bam even knows to ask for it. Maybe he does — this is, after all, a Khun Family language. Khun is a fluent speaker. Bam is only a very bad student. 

But, like Shibisu said — he’s trying. 

His steps gain confidence. He gets bolder. He leads Khun through the basic step, then the one where they walk in the same direction, then the turn that looks like a figure-eight. He extends his leg the way he’d seen Khun do with Jyu Viole Grace, and Khun responds by canting the instep of his foot up Bam’s leg, just as the ghost had done to him, in a smooth caress. The fabric of Bam’s trousers catches on the sole of Khun’s shoe, riding up his leg with the movement, and Bam feels the whisper of fabric like a touch on his skin — barely there and entirely alight, all at once.

“I didn’t teach you this,” Khun says, amused, and this next move, Bam steals from Michael — cuing a sharp turn for Khun to embellish his steps around, serpentine twists and flicks of the heel. “You’re a quick study.” 

In lieu of responding, Bam pulls him a little closer, the way he’d seen Khun do. The way he’s been wanting to — cheek to cheek, chest to chest, heart to heart. Bam presses his hand against Khun’s back and wills the thought: Listen.

Those tango steps, longing and lingering — on the pier, in the ballroom, in front of his mirror, in his nightmares and dreams. So Bam lets his longing linger and, slowly, Khun follows. 

When he goes in for the dip, he remembers every dip of Khun’s that he’s seen — stepping forward and leaning over as Viole and Maria and Michael arched for him, performative and impersonal. But this — this is different. Bam signals the dip and Khun goes with him — pliant and balanced and trusting, waiting for Bam to curve into him. They hold it there for a few breathless moments — a pair of commas, tucked into each other. The continuation of those halfway-dropped conversations, those unspoken questions.

And, of course, the answer.

It is ineloquent and clumsy. But it is sincere.

I love you, he thinks. I love you, I love you.

And he must’ve done something right, he must’ve gotten it right this time, because after a moment, Khun’s expression clears into one of understanding.

“Oh,” he says, and breaks into a small, helpless smile.

There’s a light breeze on their way back to the patio, and it blows wisps of Bam’s hair in all directions, batting at his face. Khun watches with fondness and exasperation as Bam blows a strand away from his mouth. “You should pin it back,” Khun says, and moves to tuck a strand behind his ear. 

They’ve done this before, Khun thinks. There had been a moment years ago, on the 52nd floor, when he had reached out, just like this.

The realization had been instant, as soon as Bam appeared on the ramp. His hair was longer, and there were sixteen possible explanations for it. Khun eliminated them in quick order until the most plausible one remained — Bam had recommitted to FUG. Recommitted to being Jyu Viole Grace. 

He’d gotten the briefing, of course, when he’d awoken from his coma. Shibisu had been thorough, and then there had been the calls with Bam — pleased, earnest, but tired. Weary, maybe, and that was a failing on Khun’s part, too. What good was he, as a lightbearer, if this was what it came to?

It was one thing to ally with FUG, and another to recommit to it. Khun remembered how reluctant Bam had been to put on the Viole wig, back at the Name Hunt Station — and in a dark, selfish corner of his thoughts, Khun hadn’t wanted him to either. Jyu Viole Grace was unreachable, intangible — a half-dead boy somewhere far, far away. Jyu Viole Grace was seven long years: six of them pawing about in the dark, one of them wallowing in fierce anger and regret, and none of them being where he needed to be. 

Jyu Viole Grace was the finish line.

Bam spotted him and ran down the ramp, raced to him across the platform, an object in motion. And Khun stood there, staring the finish line in the face — wanting the race, the great paradox, to last just a bit longer. 

Bam stopped in front of him, his hair a mess. “Your hair’s sure grown a lot,” Khun said, and absently started to reach out, wanting to brush a stray strand back — wanting to brush the finish line away, push it back to a later date — 

“It’s still not as long as I’d like.” 

And then guilt and resignation had settled in turn. This was the race he’d chosen to run. It was a fool’s errand to change the rules now. 

He’d retracted his hand and thought, not for the first time, of being left. Leaving first. Things he’d been raised to believe in.

But now, tucking Bam’s hair back with his fingers, he thinks that maybe that’s not quite right.

“You can show me later,” Bam says. “How to pin it back.”

It’s not so much a request for hairpinning as a request for later, and it makes Khun bite back a smile.

They try to sneak back into the group, where everyone is still drunkenly celebrating — but Shibisu spots them and calls them out immediately, slinging an arm around each of their shoulders. He drapes over them like an obnoxiously heavy blanket. “You’re back!” he slurs. “Where’d ya go?”

His breath stinks of alcohol. Khun makes a face. “I can’t believe you’re still drinking.”

Endorsi snorts. She looks close to drunk too, and her voice is petulant when she mutters, “You never believe anything.”

Shibisu points a wobbly finger at him. “She’s right.”

Khun scowls. What an asinine conversation to come back to. “I believe the things that matter,” he says anyway, because they are drunk and he is mostly in a good mood. 

Rak rumbles with laughter. “No, you don’t. Remember the Hidden Floor test? With th—mmph!” Endorsi clamps a hasty hand over his mouth.

“Hansung Yu’s test,” Bam adds quietly, smiling. 

“There’s a lot of bullshit out there,” he says, and pretends not to hear Bam’s comment. “I’ve learned to be discriminatory. You can’t believe everything you hear.” 

“You’re full of shit,” Shibisu tells him. Hatz nods.

“I’m not debating this with a hoard of drunkards,” Khun says primly, and pours himself a glass of soju.

“I’m not drunk,” Bam pipes up, and laughs at the flat look Khun gives him. “Neither is Ran. Debate it with us.”

“Yeah, Khun,”  Shibisu says. “Give us a counterexample.”

Khun traces the rim of his glass with his finger, exasperated. In the dark, under the lamp light, the liquid looks almost gold. 

He doesn’t think he was wrong before, exactly — dead sisters littering a ballroom, the uncertain tickle in his throat. Those things had been true at the time, and they might become true again. But things change. And things are a little different now.

This is what Khun believes in: Their team. Their friends, drunk on soju, out on the patio. The touch of a hand on his shoulder blade. The touch of a finger along his throat, tracing invisible lines. Whispered words on the dock. So many things. And—

“Us,” he says at last, looking at Bam. “I believe in us.” 

When they sleep, their dreams are quiet.

For the first time in a week, Shibisu wakes up feeling well-rested. He opens his eyes to weak sunlight streaming into his room, dappling the white of his duvet, and sighs. For once, there’s nothing to stress about. They’ll leave this floor at midday, and until then, there’s nothing to do but pack and relax.

Still, this is a little earlier than he normally wakes, and it takes him a second to realize why: There is the faint sound of laughter and shouting coming from outside. For a moment he wonders if it’s another one of the manor’s tricks, and burrows deeper under the covers, groaning. But the voices sound kind of familiar, and slowly, suspiciously, he pops his head back out from beneath his blankets to take a closer listen.

Fifteen minutes later, he is plodding out into the courtyard in his pajamas, his arms stretched in a yawn. At this hour, the grass is still wet with morning dew. He wanders around barefoot, looking for the source of the noise. When he finds it, he stops.

There are three figures running around, just to the side of the courtyard. Two of them — Ran and Rak, it looks like — are moving to block someone who is dribbling an orange ball. The figure shoots the ball up high, and it arcs cleanly in the air, landing into what looks to be a makeshift hoop.

Shibisu blinks once, then blinks twice, because — that can’t be Khun. Khun, who sleeps with one eye open, who does not smile except to smirk, who has turned Shibisu down every time he’s asked — wearing honest-to-god basketball shorts, playing honest-to-god basketball. Running and laughing and shouting.

“He used to play basketball with us,” Ran had said, some nights ago — and Shibisu hadn’t believed him then, hadn’t been able to imagine it. But— 

Khun glances over. “Oh, Isu.” He holds up the ball. “Do you want to play?”

“I’m hallucinating,” Shibisu decides.

Khun looks confused, and then annoyed. “What are you talking about? Do you want to play or don’t you? We need one more person for a two-on-two.”

With the day breaking just so, light reflects off of morning mist and traces Khun’s silhouette, highlighting him where he stands. He is evening colors and dawn colors, fire and water colors, all spilling wide open into a sunlight-outlined person — this tired, smiling person — for Shibisu to see. And Shibisu sees. 

His bottom lip wobbles. “Khun,”  he wails, and launches himself at him.

“Wh—get off of me!” 

There you are, Shibisu thinks happily, clinging to him like a barnacle. There you’ve been, this whole time.

Hwaryun’s ship is due to arrive shortly. While everyone else is finishing up packing, Bam sneaks away to wait by the shore.

The pier is a strange place, ever-changing. In the evenings it had been solid and silent and all-encompassing, like hiding alone under the covers, like whispering secrets into the dark. At dawn, the pier had been a nascent thing — shy and soft, blooming what ifs in pink. 

It’s late morning now, close to midday, and the pier is this: A clear, crisp stretch. A light breeze that wraps itself around his shoulders. A sky that is blue and blue and blue. 

They are leaving this floor today, and per the rules, they’ll never be allowed to talk about it again. The dances, the forest, and the dreams will all be locked in a wordless place. Bam is only starting to learn about language and all the things it can do, all the forms it can take. Words are hard — but there are so many ways to speak. 

Shh, shh, whisper the waves. 

He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be back here, so he sits here now and tries to etch it into his memory — the color of the sea, the shape of the water, the feel of boardwalk wood. It’s stupid to feel melancholy about saying goodbye to a floor that’s done nothing but aggrieve him, but this dock is different. This dock is special. He has received so much, here on this dock.

“Bam?”

Bam knows it’s Khun before he hears his voice — knows from the sound of brisk, steady steps on the boardwalk. They stop a few paces away from where Bam sits, with his feet dangling over the edge, over the water. 

Bam turns to look at him. Khun doesn’t seem surprised to find him here, and that is something special, too. Another memory to file away — technicolor-vivid, anchored in love. All the blue in the world, safe and whole, contained in a moment.

His heart is big and quiet. He is always being found.

“We’re leaving,” Khun says. “The ship’s here.”

Bam is reluctant to move. He had been so unhappy to come to this floor, and now he finds he doesn’t want to leave.

“A few more minutes?” he asks.

Khun looks at him curiously. After a beat, he shrugs and smiles. “Okay,” he says.

Bam scoots over to make room, and Khun sits down next to him. His right hand finds Bam’s left. Their fingers twine together. 

They stay like that for a long time.