PROLOGUE
The room stank faintly of mildew, paint thinner, and cat piss. Three layers of poverty stacked on top of each other, pressed in with the hum of faulty radiators and the distant throb of traffic.
Haneul lay on the secondhand mattress, braid sprawled across his chest, vinyl jacket still half-zipped because he hadn’t bothered to undress. His lip was split again, his ribs blooming purple where Minseok’s hand had dug in too hard hours earlier, but the ache had already dulled to background noise.
The pillow still smelled like Minseok. Not warmth, not sweat, not anything tender—just cheap cologne layered over the bitter tang of come and blood and something meaner. Like control. Like a claim he never earned but always left behind. But Minseok never stayed the night. He always left with that same smirk, that quietyou’re lucky I picked youthat made Haneul’s stomach knot even when his mouth curled into mockery.
The apartment was silent without him, except for the faint scratch of Byul, the stray cat, at the door and the soft drip of something leaking in the bathroom.
Haneul drifted down into a sleep that wasn’t sleep.
At first it was the familiar chaos of noise and color of a dream about Velvet Eclipse: faces smeared with club-light, hands on his waist, voices calling him Cheonsa in tones that never meant angel. But then it shifted. The pink turned red, deep and consuming. The smoke turned into fire that didn’t burn.
A man stood in the dark behind his eyes. Too tall. Shoulders like a wall. Eyes like embers banked under ash, looking at himwith a weight that hurt more than Minseok’s hands ever had. He couldn’t see the man’s face clearly, only the outline of long black hair, the scent of leather and cypress oil and something warm, almost holy.
And then… heat. Not violent, not cruel, just there. Wrapping around him like a cage that wasn’t a cage. He wanted to snarl, to spit, to claw, but instead his body trembled like prey cornered by recognition.
The man reached. Not fast, not to strike. Just reached, hand open.
Haneul woke with a sound caught between a hiss and a cry.
His chest was heaving. The braid tangled in his fist was damp with sweat. His heart hammered like he’d run through the city in bare feet. He sat up too fast, head spinning, ribs aching where the bruise stretched. The shadows in the apartment looked wrong, like they were watching.
“Fuck,” he muttered to the peeling wallpaper, dragging his knees to his chest. His mouth tasted of smoke that wasn’t there.
The cat yowled once, offended by the noise, then padded back to silence.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum as if he could grind the ache out, but it stayed. That nameless, sickening pull. That ghost-touch on his hair. His hand drifted to the braid across his chest, fingers brushing the safety pin he’d tied in two weeks ago. It dug into his skin when he slept. He liked that. Better to wake aching than forget why he needed to fight.
He didn’t sleep again.
By the time the sky went gray, he was already on the subway, eyeliner smudged from the night before, half-asleep on the plastic seat with his braid wrapped around his throat like anoose. He wiped fog from the subway window, but the reflection didn’t look like his. Something older stared back—tired, bruised, wrong-eyed. Like it knew what he’d dreamed.
His classmates at the arts college would snicker at the bruises, the eye bags, the smell of cigarettes. He’d snarl back, because that was easier.
But inside? Inside, his chest wouldn’t stop pounding. Like something had followed him out of the dream.
??????
Chapter One – Bruises, Dreamt and Given
The next day was the usual.
Attending college and making the best of the scholarship granted as part of the program to help pitiful, sorry, orphaned kids blend back into society—or try, at least.
Things were slightly easier now than they were during school years… at least the bullying was less obvious.
He still got called a “sissy” sometimes, or mocked by the kinds of boys who wore their masculinity like a choking collar.
“Haneul?” they’d snort. “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
He never answered. Not out loud.
It didn’t bother him. Not really. The slurs had long since calcified into background noise, like elevator chimes or subway brakes.
They didn’t know what the name meant.
Sky.
