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Cigarette ash falls and simmers like red stars on his cheek. It doesn’t hurt, not after everything else that’s been done to him, and that, if nothing else, should scare him, but he already burnt through all of his fear hours ago, when this first started. When the first cigarette butt was pressed into his inner wrist, smearing the skin pink and bubbly, like gum over concrete. Hands pull and tug at him, stretching his tired body. One arm above his head, the other crushed under the sole of a boy that seems twice his height from where Jaemin lays on the ground. He’d never quite been big enough despite all the milk his mother had made him drink as a child. What fucking use was it, anyway. He closes his eyes and thinks he can taste it, swimming there in the back of his throat like a half-dead fish that just won’t flush itself down the pipes. What fucking use. Stars spin as he is dragged across the ground. He can’t tell whether they’re real or not; he sees stars even when the sun’s up. They must have broke something in him more tangible than his spirit when they took that brick to his head. He wishes they’d just finished him off there and then. It isn’t murder, now. It can only be mercy. They say something, just as they throw Jaemin off the edge, but he never quite catches what. Last words watch as he tips over ten floors, down to the road below. His body shatters. Pain is beyond him. Anything that was Jaemin splinters like light through a prism, and all that is left behind, is— His mother tracing the constellation of the cowherd and the weaver girl in his palm, over and over. Vega, Deneb, Altair. Always in that order, keeping the lovers at each end of the magpie bridge. Her first lesson to him had been of love, and her second, that there would always be something out of reach, for him. She would lift the tip of her finger from his palm, and the skin there would blister in the aftermath of her touch. He’d chase after it, hands grabbing air where she once was. These days, he finds her in the sky, at Chilseok, after the fireworks bloom and the sky can breathe once again. Vega, Deneb, Altair, and Her, winking at him from a little boat drifting along the heavenly river. —his eyes open and he finds himself staring at the night sky. There aren’t any stars. Pollution is so thick, these days, he can feel it in the back of his throat, tangling there like a fisherman’s knot. He can hardly swallow around it, can hardly breathe, and he tries to open his jaw to bite off what little air he can, but he finds it broken. Huh. It’s been open this whole time, shattered, just like the rest of him. He wiggles his toes and finds they don’t respond. Not good. He tries his fingers. There’s a tingle, there, the ghost of feeling, and he tries to picture his mother, the gentle brush of her fingers painting Vega, Deneb, Altair, and his hand clenches. The bones in his arm crunch like cereal between teeth. He should be dead. Perhaps he is. He fell far enough that he shouldn’t even be a body. He’s more Jaemin jam than anything, a smear of it down the sidewalk as if it’s toast in the early morning. The more he moves the more the bits inside of him flop around like the glitter inside of a water snake toy. The parts of his own skull and spine that had shrapnelled his brain start to wiggle their way out like worms evacuating a rotten apple. The liquified walls of his burst intestines coagulate back together. His leg, which had crumpled like a slinky upon meeting the concrete from ten floors up, slowly unwinds itself, knitting back to full length with ropes of blood that had spilled down the gutters, and the bits of bone which had formed their own mountain ridge inside of his thigh. He isn’t entire. There’s something missing, there, inside of him, something he cannot voice, something he cannot remember. The shape of it aches and swells. Jaemin places a hand on his chest as if he could know it by touch, but finds nothing there. Oh well. He stands and dusts himself off. Cracks his neck from side to side, his ear meeting the bone of his shoulder with each movement. Then, he looks up. The outline of shadows peering over the ledge. Jaemin smiles. There are three boys. He terms them, in his head, Vega, Deneb, Altair, though he knows their names in Hanja, it won’t help him here. Draw a line from one to the other. Strike them off, like entries on a checklist. “I’m sorry!” Jisung cries, his eyes red-rimmed, fat tears spilling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry, hyung, I didn’t think they’d come for you.”He’s on his knees, now, bowing down in front of Jaemin as if it were penance. If Jaemin were a better man he’d fall to his knees, too, and pull Jisung up from the ground, but as it stands, Jaemin fell ten floors, and his knees are kinda achey. They twinge with even the suggestion of bending. Jaemin sighs and walks forward to put a comforting hand on Jisung’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Jisung-ah. This hyung can take it. It was all a misunderstanding, anyway.”A sniffle. “Misunderstanding?” Jisung asks, daring to look up at Jaemin for the first time. “Yes. A misunderstanding. You don’t owe them anything, Jisung. I don’t owe them anything either. They owe us.” Jisung frowns, but gets up off his knees. He’s taller than Jaemin, probably always will be, and the thought of it settles something inside of him. Let this boy be tall. Let him never stop growing. Let him reach up and strangle the stars, keep them from spinning out of place. It’d do them fucking good.“What do they owe us for?” Jisung asks. Well, for killing me of course, Jaemin thinks, but does not say. For taking a brick to my head, and snapping my arm, and then throwing me off the top of a building. But for more than that, too. For burning holes in my wrist and stealing the answers from my homework and smashing my phone screen. Blaming you for their lost textbooks, and then demanding interest on its repayment.They owe us for the state of the economy and the narrowing freedom of the press, for the price of public transport, and the sheer injustice of my father’s mortgage. But don’t worry, Jisung-ah. I’ll make them pay.He looks at Jisung. He says none of this. He smiles, and tastes the blood pool in his mouth.