Semper, Scentia
Semper, Scentia | Kris/Chanyeol | 4.8k~ | PG-15 (violence, abuse (highlight, because spoilers) between both peers and parents/children if you are not comfortable with this, do not read. it also contains minor alcohol, blood, and animorphus content) | Everything about Chanyeol screamed fire, but it also begged ice. Yifan's nature flew him high, but his understanding drove him into the ground. There's a reason they say knowledge and infinity don't go hand-in-hand.
epilogue on AFF here > [x]
Yifan is exhausted and collapsed on the cement floor of the warehouse they broke into, panting and coughing up blood as Chanyeol kneels in front of him. He feels his stomach tighten when Chanyeol puts his lips next to his ear, because of the inherent fear he developed for the younger boy over the years they have been together. Chanyeol's long hair falls against Yifan's face and he's too weak to do anything to defend himself when Chanyeol whispers harsh words into his ear.
“See, this is why you get nothing done. When you get a little tired, you throw a pity party.” Chanyeol pushes on his knees and stands up in front of Yifan in a way that he looks like he will kick him if he doesn't move.
Yifan puts his arms underneath his body and tries to get up push-up style, but he just falls onto the cement once again, his cheek landing in a pile of his blood. He moves an arm to wipe the red liquid from his lips and raises hooded eyes at his companion.
“I can't-” he tries to say, but he's cut off when Chanyeol grabs the shoulders of his jacket and harshly pulls him into an upright position, but his feet are still dragging on the floor. The sudden movement has made Yifan incredibly dizzy, and he can't even muster up enough strength to lift his head to match the younger's height. He is still a little bit taller than Chanyeol.
Chanyeol breathes right on his face and hisses, “You are a motherfucking dragon.” Kris opens his eyes and looks right into Chanyeol's, which always seem to be on fire. His mom warned him when he first befriended the fire-breather that he had fire in his eyes, but ice in his heart and Yifan didn't heed the warning enough. Chanyeol's expression changes from annoyed to angry and his grip tightens on Yifan's leather jacket. “Spread your wings!” he yells.
Then he throws the older boy toward the wall.
-
When Yifan looks back on what they've gone through together, he usually measures the time by the length of Chanyeol's hair. It just keeps growing out, and it seems as if the younger boy hasn't cut it at all since he entered the school. But he has, because Yifan knows Chanyeol's hair grows rapidly, yet the longest it's ever gotten is just passed his shoulder blades. It's cut progressively and sneakily, convincing everyone that he just doesn't care about the length. It's like an optical allusion, a trick to the eye, which Yifan soon realized he has lots of.
When they first met, Chanyeol's hair was considerably short, fringe was just starting to get to his eyebrows.
-
It was a sunny, but cold, day in the fall, when the first semester of the school year was starting. Everyone was on the front lawn of the massive castle-like school, because the front gates were already locked behind them and they didn't have any schedules and had had no tours so they could not go inside.
Some of the students were very young, the school opened up at grade seven after all, and others were older. Most of the children were there because they could not control their power, or they hurt someone in some way on accident. An unsettling mood was looming above the massive courtyard, and seemed to affect everyone in it to some degree.
Everyone, of course, except two boys near the center.
One was walking a few feet above the ground, floating as he paced back and forth watching everything unfold around him. It was his fourth year at the school, him being the older age of sixteen, and he enjoyed to see new skittish students enter every year. He could fly, that was obvious, but he couldn't soar through the clouds like most people thought he could when he mentioned his skill. He could just, well, float, because managing a massive force that churns within the body is a more difficult skill than one could imagine. So he just used his perfected air-walking, his height added onto the added boost made him several feet above anyone, and observed.
This year, he had his eyes on the other unaffected boy, a very small boy who was walking with a purpose through the middle of the yard. His whole body was skinny, almost just skin-and-bones, but he was very tall for his age-which seemed to be about thirteen. He had curly hair sitting on top of his head, and his bangs barely met his knitted eyebrows. The boy was walking toward him, except not to him. He seemed to be walking toward the front door of the school, like there was someone inside that seriously needed to pay for a wrong they committed.
He was passing Yifan when Yifan called out and stopped him.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked and the boy didn't even jump before he spun and looked up, immediately catching the eye of the older, taller boy. They looked hard at each other for a couple of moments before the small boy smiled, his eye doing a very pronounced twitch, and his features softening completely.
“Nothing,” he said nonchalantly, and Yifan almost forgot his poised walk earlier because his lie was so convincing. “The real question is, what are you doing?” the boy gestured toward the empty space underneath Yifan's feet.
“Flying,” was Yifan's simple answer. The boy scoffed and rolled his eyes, as if to say that's not what he was doing at all.
“I'm Chanyeol,” the small boy said and lifted a hand up. Yifan floated down and put his feet on the ground before taking the slender hand and shaking it.
“Yifan.”
“I bet you're top of the class or something, eh?” Chanyeol said and looked Yifan right in the eye. Chanyeol was up to about Yifan's chin, but the way he was standing and talking, Yifan didn't even seem to notice.
“The teachers value me more, see, because I'm the type who-”
“Lives forever. Yeah. I know. You guys take so much pride in your little gift; you utter semper anticus, always and forever, like a prayer every night before you go to bed. You know, immortality isn't exactly a blessing. In my opinion, which should be a very valued opinion, it's a curse.”
Yifan was both surprised and amused, because the little kid knew what he was going to say and buffed himself up to way bigger than he was. He suppressed the laugh that was bubbling in his chest and cleared his throat instead.
“What are you?”
“Scentia est potestas,” Chanyeol said and smiled, and Yifan nodded.
“Knowledge is power.”
“Correct!” Chanyeol said in a mocking tone, and Yifan asked himself why he was even talking to the little shrimp in the first place. “I take knowledge in like a sponge takes in water. Everything at first, and then I filter it out until I only keep the valuable things. I'm in the eighth grade, by the way.”
“What's your power? You already know mine is flying.”
“Well since we're trying to be fair here, why don't I just show you and you guess!” Yifan nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. Chanyeol looked behind him to make sure there was no one near, and then he took his right arm and put it in front of him before closing his eyes and thrusting it very quickly to his side.
When he opened his eyes, his irises were no longer a brilliant black, they were orange and red and moved like flames. That wasn't the most shocking part, because behind the small boy was a phoenix made of fire, flapping it's wings and creating a barrier from Chanyeol and everyone else. It was bright and very hot, Yifan wiped the drops of sweat that were glistening from his brow, making Chanyeol smirk. When the phoenix went away and Chanyeol's eyes become a normal color, he looked at Yifan expectantly, but the older boy was so pale and looked like he was about to throw up.
“O-our other fire-breather, Sungyeol, is in eleventh grade and he c-can only,” Yifan stopped talking and held up his hand and twisted it. Chanyeol understood: the boy could only light up his hand. Chanyeol laughed.
“My mom's husband is Professor Lee here, and remember, I'm a scentia; a sponge. I could do that since I was twelve. I can pretty much do anything, so I have no idea why I'm here with all of you stupid people who can't even realize that your power is a ball inside of you that you can manipulate into anything.” He stopped talking and rolled his eyes, muttering a few curses to himself in a language that sounded just like the crackling of the flames he just conjured, before looking at Yifan with the bright smile he presented earlier. “Anyway, I have to go! See you around, Wu.”
While Yifan was trying to figure out how Chanyeol knew his surname, Chanyeol disappeared in the direction of the front door of the school.
-
The second time they met was almost seven months later when Chanyeol, still as scrawny as ever, stumbled out of Professor Lee's classroom at around eight in the evening with a bleeding lip and bruises lining his arms. He wasn't crying, though, and he dabbed blood from his split lip with his delicate fingertips and looked at the red stains on his skin with wonderment. His hair was just passed his jawline then, and it was stained red in patches also.
Yifan was walking out of the library when he saw Chanyeol stumble and fall in the hallway and seemingly not have the energy, nor will, to get up. Yifan jogged over to the boy, who was very snarky last time they had the pleasure of talking, and kneeled in front of him. He tilted Chanyeol's chin up toward him and saw the blood on his face and immediately scrunched up his eyebrows.
“Who did this to you, Lee?” he whispered, just in case the offender was near. Chanyeol frowned.
“It's nothing, go away.”
Chanyeol brushed him away and stood up before running down the hallway at a fast speed, considering his blatant pain and injuries.
-
Yifan flies backward, limply, and slams into the cement wall about twenty feet from Chanyeol. He slumps onto the ground and blood seeps from his hairline down his forehead. Chanyeol's hair is about a third of the way down his back now, and he flicks his bangs out of his eyes as he walks toward Yifan again. When he leans down, Yifan barely has enough energy to flinch.
“You disappoint me, Wu,” Chanyeol whispers, and it hits Yifan like a hard slap in the face. He looks at Chanyeol with wide eyes and Chanyeol shrugs angrily before going to stand in the middle. He motions around, angrily, and Yifan doesn't know what he's trying to say with his rapid hand gestures. He feels like he's about to explode, like this is all the strain he can take for his whole lifetime, and he's only twenty-one. “It's a ball, Yifan. You concentrate on it, grab it, and then you throw it upward. Like this.”
Chanyeol thrusts his head up rapidly, and his body burns up completely, until he is enveloped in flames, and then the ball of fire twists and wings emerge, transforming Chanyeol into a flaming Phoenix. He flaps his wings two or three times before the phoenix twists back into a ball and Chanyeol falls onto the floor in a kneeling position with one hand on the cement. The awesome display only lasted for a moment, but Yifan can't take his eyes from the boy who is standing up and brushing his ash-covered jeans like it was nothing. Yifan had, of course, seen the display before, but it strikes him silent every time.
Chanyeol finishes, or gets bored, Yifan never knows with him, and cocks his head in his direction. Chanyeol looks at the bleeding boy in front of him and smirks evilly.
“Your turn.”
-
Chanyeol was almost sixteen when they met for a third time, and he was highly intoxicated and almost fell on Yifan, his just-about shoulder length hair flying through the air. Yifan, looking back, realizes he's never seen Chanyeol with his hair tied up.
Chanyeol had a gnarly bruise on his jawline, it was yellowing on the outside and brown in the middle. Yifan helped Chanyeol into an upright position and tried to take a better look at the bruise but Chanyeol kept turning his head away so it wasn't visible. His eyes were bloodshot and he was breathing hard, pressing his body against Yifan's in the darkness of the empty library.
During the time they hadn't had the pleasure of the other's acquaintance, Chanyeol had changed from a short-ish, scrawny boy to a tall boy who had built his muscles up on his arms and had overall become wider. He was almost the same size as Yifan. His ears stuck out in between his thick, copper hair, and his big eyes were hooded as if he wasn't quite awake, but not asleep either.
Chanyeol's breath smelled like the icky burnt residue scotch had to offer, his aura smelled like the night, and his clothes were cold from the harsh winds of autumn.
“Yifan, I am a phoenix,” he whispered into Yifan's shoulder and slumped even more. “I'm not a human, I am a phoenix.”
Yifan didn't know what to say, because Chanyeol was obviously drunk and didn't know what he was talking about. “Okay,” he said and adjusted Chanyeol so he could hold him upright more, because his body was sagging and his legs were giving out.
“But if I'm not a phoenix, if I'm just a fake, I don't even have 'human' to fall back on. If I can't be a phoenix, I'm nothing.”
“You can be a phoenix, Chanyeol,” he said and Chanyeol wrapped his arms around Yifan's neck. His breathing was less even than it already was. “Let's get you back to your dorm-”
“No!” Chanyeol was grabbing at his blazer really hard, with iron grips, and shaking his head. “No, I can't go back there. Stay here with me.”
“We can't stay in here the whole night, Lee. Do you want to go over to your father-”
Chanyeol's arms tightened around Yifan's neck and his fingernails dug into Yifan's back as he shook his head and began to cry. “I can't go there either. I don't belong here, Yifan. I don't belong anywhere.”
“You're drunk, Lee. You need to sleep.”
“I can't sleep, the monsters-”
“They won't get you, I'll be right here.”
When Yifan awoke under a bookshelf in the morning, Chanyeol was gone and didn't leave any sort of trace behind, at all. Yifan sat up and adjusted his clothing, and he began to think that he just fell asleep over his books and nothing even happened the night before. But when he went back to his dorm, sneaking passed his roommate at three AM and into the bathroom, he saw eight nail-shaped cuts along the top of his back.
-
It was a week later that Chanyeol went up to Yifan in the library and asked if he wanted to really fly. Chanyeol looked totally different than the drunk, confused boy Yifan had helped earlier; he looked well-rested and calm. Yifan didn't know what Chanyeol meant by his offer, but Chanyeol was staring at him so intensely that he said yes anyway.
They first broke into the warehouse that night. Chanyeol was dressed in jeans and a ragged-looking sweatshirt, and Yifan was still in his school uniform. Chanyeol picked the lock at the side-door and held it open for Yifan. They crept into the massive dark room and Chanyeol flicked a light switch, illuminating a vast, empty cement room.
Chanyeol didn't seem nervous, he didn't even seem to have any feelings at all except for thievery and deceit until the week before. He went to the center of the room and set down his bag before opening it up and presenting three massive volumes and beckoning Yifan over.
“I've been studying, and I think that you just need to do what I do when I summon my phoenix. You just need to think inside your ball and shoot. Tell me, how do you get yourself to float like you always do, maybe that will help me figure out how you're going to do this,” Chanyeol said and looked at Yifan expectantly, his round eyes glimmering in the dim light.
“I, um, don't really know. When I want to fly-I mean float-I just do.”
“So all you need to do is want to soar then,” Chanyeol said and opened up the book in the middle before running his fingers over the pages and mumbling to himself in the weird flame-language he used the day that they first met. After about five minutes of Chanyeol reading and Yifan staring, Chanyeol looked up and wrinkled his eyebrows at the older student. “What are you waiting for?”
Yifan cleared his throat and stepped back before closing his eyes and thinking, imagining himself flying through the clouds at a high-speed, feeling the wind on his face.
Part of the ominous difference between Yifan and Chanyeol is how they manipulate their power. To Chanyeol, it is a ball. He can reach inside the ball, bounce it, throw it, deflate it and then inflate it again; anything he wants to do to the ball, he does. It is easy for him, and he can't understand why Yifan can't do it. Yifan, however, has to imagine the surroundings of his power coming to life, he has to create the image in his mind and feel it on his skin before his power steps in and does the rest. It's why Chanyeol always gets so frustrated, because to him, it doesn't take that much time.
After about three minutes of Chanyeol huffing and waiting, Yifan shoots up into the air. Chanyeol smiled, thinking Yifan would start to grasp things quickly like he did, but then Yifan fell out of the air and screamed as he went down; his back hit the cement, and his head banged against the hard ground, splitting it and making it bleed, which made the otherwise grey and bland room have a spot of color.
Yifan stayed unconscious for about five hours, and Chanyeol sat next to his body the whole time, reading the book about flight and trying to find out what went wrong. Right when Yifan awoke, dizzy and sick, Chanyeol asked him to get up and try again, thus starting the first insane training session of many.
-
“Lee, just-please. You're killing me,” Yifan whispers as Chanyeol comes over to him. He's slumped in a puddle of his own blood, and his body isn't going to move even if it's forced to. He is the definition of exhausted, and he isn't going to get any better without medical help. Chanyeol sits down in front of him and studies him with a look that doesn't have a hint of pity, more a scowl of remembrance.
“You won't die, Wu. You're going to live forever,” Chanyeol whispers, like it's a threat. He smirks with a face full of an unexplainable emotion and his voice cracks, “The teachers value you more.” He gets up and he walks toward the door, his hands on his hips, as he walks to it and then turns slightly to the side. He lifts his arms and holds them out before spinning around with a crude smile upon his face. “Semper anticus, remember?”
Yifan doesn't know where Chanyeol's going with this, but he stays silent nonetheless, because he has a feeling Chanyeol would not like to be interrupted.
“Remember-remember what I said the day we met?” Chanyeol looks right at Yifan and licks his chapped lips. “It's a curse. You're cursed, because no matter how much strain you put on your body, how much pain you have to endure, you aren't going to die until someone outright kills you. And seeing that nobody here likes breaking laws, nobody would but me.” Yifan just stares. He didn't know all of this, he just knew when he stopped growing, his body would stop aging and he'd continue to live, young and pretty, as all of his peers became old and died. “But I'm not going to. I'm going to make you strong and great so you can live out your life for the both of us!” Chanyeol screams and falls to his knees, and the sound of his bones hitting the cement makes Yifan flinch. There's a tear running down Chanyeol's face now, as he looks at the bloody, pathetic mess that is Yifan, and he glares the most deathly glare Yifan ever thought he'd see. “So get up, Wu. It's your turn.”
-
When Chanyeol's hair reached his shoulders, Yifan flew. He flew around the top of the warehouse, and it was the first time he felt excited for months; the overwhelming feeling inside of him's default had become dread. He flew for as long as he could, and when he looked down at his companion, he saw a small smile on his face. The feeling of accomplishment made Yifan want to get everything done more quickly, if this was the reward.
His feet hit the ground when he landed, and he smiled at Chanyeol. Yifan had bruises all over his body, and his lip was bleeding from a previous fall, but he had flew. He thought this was the end of the training, that he had learned how to fly and that would be all he need ed to know, to painfully learn from Chanyeol, who, Yifan had to repeatedly remind himself, was not a flight-master at all. He remembered thinking for a moment that Chanyeol should become a professor, but the thought quickly evaded his mind with a scorn because of Chanyeol's teaching method.
Chanyeol patted his back, packed his books, and they left without a glance back at the warehouse; Yifan thought he was free of the torturous prison it had become and that he would never have to see it's red-stained interior again.
He figured out his mistake when Chanyeol came up to him after a month of bliss and told him he had done more research and Yifan was supposedly able to summon up a dragon from the depths of his being and make it protect him, like Chanyeol had done with his phoenix on the first day the met.
-
The second time Chanyeol showed any sort of emotion other than stern and forceful was when Chanyeol was late to the warehouse door one night. It wasn't just that Yifan got their first and had to wait for a couple of minutes, Chanyeol was hours late and had Yifan waiting outside in the dark afraid to fall asleep until it was well into the night.
When he showed up, he was walking straight, but something about him was off. He seemed to have a small limp in his right foot, and a hand was up at his face. When he came closer to Yifan, to unlock the door with the key he forged, Yifan could smell the familiar iron-smell of blood. Chanyeol opened the door and held it open for Yifan, and he went in silently.
Chanyeol didn't flick on the lights like he always did, so they were in the dark in the room. Yifan didn't say anything, and neither did Chanyeol. The younger teenager took the older's hand and walked them further into the room before kneeling down, and pulling Yifan with him. Yifan sat in the darkness with his legs crossed, and Chanyeol laid his head on Yifan's upper thigh, using it as a pillow.
Yifan hesitantly ran his fingers through Chanyeol's hair, that was just above his shoulder blades, and Chanyeol flinched when Yifan's fingers grazed over a bump on the side, but he was otherwise unresponsive.
There was a warm liquid seeping into Yifan's jeans, and he didn't need to look to know it was blood from either Chanyeol's nose or mouth, or-even though he didn't want to think so-both. He knew better than to ask, so he sat in the dark with Chanyeol all night and stroked his hair and let him cry for the two minutes he chose to.
“Lee,” he whispered when the sun started to come up. His eyes were threatening to close because he was so tired, but he let Chanyeol sleep that night because he thought he needed it more. “Lee, wake up.”
Chanyeol stirred on his lap and grunted, but he was soon sitting up and rubbing his left eye, for his right was swollen almost all of the way shut. The light was still dim, so Yifan still couldn't see the extent of his injuries, but over the course of the night he figured they were probably really bad.
“Yifan,” Chanyeol said gently, and Yifan was surprised how nice his name could sound coming from Chanyeol. He hummed in response, for he was too tired to do anything else. “Wu, please stay for three minutes after I leave, I don't want you to see me.”
He got up and Yifan heard himself limp toward the door and out. Yifan, by then, already knew that when Chanyeol told him to do something, he should, so he waited.
-
“No,” Yifan says defiantly, and even though his voice is weak and scratchy, it is plain how much Yifan means that no matter what Chanyeol says or does, he isn't going to do anything more. Chanyeol keeps glaring at him and cocks his head to the side, a silent “why” being spoken louder than any shout that can come from Chanyeol's mouth. “You work me as hard as humanly possible, and then some, but you don't do anything. Do you even know how it feels to physically not feel your body?” Yifan spits the words out evilly, putting so much hate and hurt into them as he can. He disregards all of the times he's seen Chanyeol beat up and bloody, but he's never dragging himself across the ground, Yifan tells himself as Chanyeol's eyes tear up and his look gets livid.
“I don't know? You don't know!” Chanyeol is screaming so loudly that Yifan spares time for a thought that someone will catch them, but he's quickly distracted by Chanyeol stripping off his denim jacket and throwing it to the side. “You don't know agony, Wu. You don't know how it feels to be hurt.”
Chanyeol takes off his shirt and walks toward Yifan, pointing at his mangled torso. He has burns all over his chest, and his stomach has a huge scar through it, like he was attacked with a sword. He doesn't have nipples, they seem to have been removed. His shoulders are uneven, and when he turns around, his spine is off-center and twisted. “You have no idea,” Chanyeol whispers.
Yifan is silent. It's too much to see Chanyeol like this, because he can't stop imagining how much of that damage was present on the tiny boy he saw walking with determination toward the front of the school. Speaking of that day, Yifan wonders, who was he going to see? But his mind answers it for him, and he realizes a very big detail, even though he knows it's not the whole thing.
“Lee-”
“Stop calling me that!” Chanyeol screams, and fire shoots from his hand and onto the ground, leaving a scorch mark. Yifan looks at Chanyeol with terrified eyes, and Chanyeol continues to look at him with a hard, stone-like face. He seems to have lost all emotions except for rage. His irises are burning again, like they were when he was thirteen and full of pride.
“It's your name-”
“Think, Wu, when did I ever say that was my name?”
-
This is the biography of Park Chanyeol: he was born a crime, and he lived a lie. The end.
-
Yifan graduated from the school with adequate grades, but praise from all of the teachers. He got a badge pinned onto his jacket: semper anticus, it said. It was engraved into gold and mounted on his breast, for everyone to see. Wu Yifan was going to live, always and forever.
Chanyeol graduated from the school with honors and no praise from any teacher. He didn't get any sort of badge, with any sort of engraving. Professor Lee, who was handing the badges out, didn't say anything about scentia est potestas. Park Chanyeol was going to die, that was it.
epilogue on AFF here > [x]
Yifan is exhausted and collapsed on the cement floor of the warehouse they broke into, panting and coughing up blood as Chanyeol kneels in front of him. He feels his stomach tighten when Chanyeol puts his lips next to his ear, because of the inherent fear he developed for the younger boy over the years they have been together. Chanyeol's long hair falls against Yifan's face and he's too weak to do anything to defend himself when Chanyeol whispers harsh words into his ear.
“See, this is why you get nothing done. When you get a little tired, you throw a pity party.” Chanyeol pushes on his knees and stands up in front of Yifan in a way that he looks like he will kick him if he doesn't move.
Yifan puts his arms underneath his body and tries to get up push-up style, but he just falls onto the cement once again, his cheek landing in a pile of his blood. He moves an arm to wipe the red liquid from his lips and raises hooded eyes at his companion.
“I can't-” he tries to say, but he's cut off when Chanyeol grabs the shoulders of his jacket and harshly pulls him into an upright position, but his feet are still dragging on the floor. The sudden movement has made Yifan incredibly dizzy, and he can't even muster up enough strength to lift his head to match the younger's height. He is still a little bit taller than Chanyeol.
Chanyeol breathes right on his face and hisses, “You are a motherfucking dragon.” Kris opens his eyes and looks right into Chanyeol's, which always seem to be on fire. His mom warned him when he first befriended the fire-breather that he had fire in his eyes, but ice in his heart and Yifan didn't heed the warning enough. Chanyeol's expression changes from annoyed to angry and his grip tightens on Yifan's leather jacket. “Spread your wings!” he yells.
Then he throws the older boy toward the wall.
-
When Yifan looks back on what they've gone through together, he usually measures the time by the length of Chanyeol's hair. It just keeps growing out, and it seems as if the younger boy hasn't cut it at all since he entered the school. But he has, because Yifan knows Chanyeol's hair grows rapidly, yet the longest it's ever gotten is just passed his shoulder blades. It's cut progressively and sneakily, convincing everyone that he just doesn't care about the length. It's like an optical allusion, a trick to the eye, which Yifan soon realized he has lots of.
When they first met, Chanyeol's hair was considerably short, fringe was just starting to get to his eyebrows.
-
It was a sunny, but cold, day in the fall, when the first semester of the school year was starting. Everyone was on the front lawn of the massive castle-like school, because the front gates were already locked behind them and they didn't have any schedules and had had no tours so they could not go inside.
Some of the students were very young, the school opened up at grade seven after all, and others were older. Most of the children were there because they could not control their power, or they hurt someone in some way on accident. An unsettling mood was looming above the massive courtyard, and seemed to affect everyone in it to some degree.
Everyone, of course, except two boys near the center.
One was walking a few feet above the ground, floating as he paced back and forth watching everything unfold around him. It was his fourth year at the school, him being the older age of sixteen, and he enjoyed to see new skittish students enter every year. He could fly, that was obvious, but he couldn't soar through the clouds like most people thought he could when he mentioned his skill. He could just, well, float, because managing a massive force that churns within the body is a more difficult skill than one could imagine. So he just used his perfected air-walking, his height added onto the added boost made him several feet above anyone, and observed.
This year, he had his eyes on the other unaffected boy, a very small boy who was walking with a purpose through the middle of the yard. His whole body was skinny, almost just skin-and-bones, but he was very tall for his age-which seemed to be about thirteen. He had curly hair sitting on top of his head, and his bangs barely met his knitted eyebrows. The boy was walking toward him, except not to him. He seemed to be walking toward the front door of the school, like there was someone inside that seriously needed to pay for a wrong they committed.
He was passing Yifan when Yifan called out and stopped him.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked and the boy didn't even jump before he spun and looked up, immediately catching the eye of the older, taller boy. They looked hard at each other for a couple of moments before the small boy smiled, his eye doing a very pronounced twitch, and his features softening completely.
“Nothing,” he said nonchalantly, and Yifan almost forgot his poised walk earlier because his lie was so convincing. “The real question is, what are you doing?” the boy gestured toward the empty space underneath Yifan's feet.
“Flying,” was Yifan's simple answer. The boy scoffed and rolled his eyes, as if to say that's not what he was doing at all.
“I'm Chanyeol,” the small boy said and lifted a hand up. Yifan floated down and put his feet on the ground before taking the slender hand and shaking it.
“Yifan.”
“I bet you're top of the class or something, eh?” Chanyeol said and looked Yifan right in the eye. Chanyeol was up to about Yifan's chin, but the way he was standing and talking, Yifan didn't even seem to notice.
“The teachers value me more, see, because I'm the type who-”
“Lives forever. Yeah. I know. You guys take so much pride in your little gift; you utter semper anticus, always and forever, like a prayer every night before you go to bed. You know, immortality isn't exactly a blessing. In my opinion, which should be a very valued opinion, it's a curse.”
Yifan was both surprised and amused, because the little kid knew what he was going to say and buffed himself up to way bigger than he was. He suppressed the laugh that was bubbling in his chest and cleared his throat instead.
“What are you?”
“Scentia est potestas,” Chanyeol said and smiled, and Yifan nodded.
“Knowledge is power.”
“Correct!” Chanyeol said in a mocking tone, and Yifan asked himself why he was even talking to the little shrimp in the first place. “I take knowledge in like a sponge takes in water. Everything at first, and then I filter it out until I only keep the valuable things. I'm in the eighth grade, by the way.”
“What's your power? You already know mine is flying.”
“Well since we're trying to be fair here, why don't I just show you and you guess!” Yifan nodded, because there was nothing else he could do. Chanyeol looked behind him to make sure there was no one near, and then he took his right arm and put it in front of him before closing his eyes and thrusting it very quickly to his side.
When he opened his eyes, his irises were no longer a brilliant black, they were orange and red and moved like flames. That wasn't the most shocking part, because behind the small boy was a phoenix made of fire, flapping it's wings and creating a barrier from Chanyeol and everyone else. It was bright and very hot, Yifan wiped the drops of sweat that were glistening from his brow, making Chanyeol smirk. When the phoenix went away and Chanyeol's eyes become a normal color, he looked at Yifan expectantly, but the older boy was so pale and looked like he was about to throw up.
“O-our other fire-breather, Sungyeol, is in eleventh grade and he c-can only,” Yifan stopped talking and held up his hand and twisted it. Chanyeol understood: the boy could only light up his hand. Chanyeol laughed.
“My mom's husband is Professor Lee here, and remember, I'm a scentia; a sponge. I could do that since I was twelve. I can pretty much do anything, so I have no idea why I'm here with all of you stupid people who can't even realize that your power is a ball inside of you that you can manipulate into anything.” He stopped talking and rolled his eyes, muttering a few curses to himself in a language that sounded just like the crackling of the flames he just conjured, before looking at Yifan with the bright smile he presented earlier. “Anyway, I have to go! See you around, Wu.”
While Yifan was trying to figure out how Chanyeol knew his surname, Chanyeol disappeared in the direction of the front door of the school.
-
The second time they met was almost seven months later when Chanyeol, still as scrawny as ever, stumbled out of Professor Lee's classroom at around eight in the evening with a bleeding lip and bruises lining his arms. He wasn't crying, though, and he dabbed blood from his split lip with his delicate fingertips and looked at the red stains on his skin with wonderment. His hair was just passed his jawline then, and it was stained red in patches also.
Yifan was walking out of the library when he saw Chanyeol stumble and fall in the hallway and seemingly not have the energy, nor will, to get up. Yifan jogged over to the boy, who was very snarky last time they had the pleasure of talking, and kneeled in front of him. He tilted Chanyeol's chin up toward him and saw the blood on his face and immediately scrunched up his eyebrows.
“Who did this to you, Lee?” he whispered, just in case the offender was near. Chanyeol frowned.
“It's nothing, go away.”
Chanyeol brushed him away and stood up before running down the hallway at a fast speed, considering his blatant pain and injuries.
-
Yifan flies backward, limply, and slams into the cement wall about twenty feet from Chanyeol. He slumps onto the ground and blood seeps from his hairline down his forehead. Chanyeol's hair is about a third of the way down his back now, and he flicks his bangs out of his eyes as he walks toward Yifan again. When he leans down, Yifan barely has enough energy to flinch.
“You disappoint me, Wu,” Chanyeol whispers, and it hits Yifan like a hard slap in the face. He looks at Chanyeol with wide eyes and Chanyeol shrugs angrily before going to stand in the middle. He motions around, angrily, and Yifan doesn't know what he's trying to say with his rapid hand gestures. He feels like he's about to explode, like this is all the strain he can take for his whole lifetime, and he's only twenty-one. “It's a ball, Yifan. You concentrate on it, grab it, and then you throw it upward. Like this.”
Chanyeol thrusts his head up rapidly, and his body burns up completely, until he is enveloped in flames, and then the ball of fire twists and wings emerge, transforming Chanyeol into a flaming Phoenix. He flaps his wings two or three times before the phoenix twists back into a ball and Chanyeol falls onto the floor in a kneeling position with one hand on the cement. The awesome display only lasted for a moment, but Yifan can't take his eyes from the boy who is standing up and brushing his ash-covered jeans like it was nothing. Yifan had, of course, seen the display before, but it strikes him silent every time.
Chanyeol finishes, or gets bored, Yifan never knows with him, and cocks his head in his direction. Chanyeol looks at the bleeding boy in front of him and smirks evilly.
“Your turn.”
-
Chanyeol was almost sixteen when they met for a third time, and he was highly intoxicated and almost fell on Yifan, his just-about shoulder length hair flying through the air. Yifan, looking back, realizes he's never seen Chanyeol with his hair tied up.
Chanyeol had a gnarly bruise on his jawline, it was yellowing on the outside and brown in the middle. Yifan helped Chanyeol into an upright position and tried to take a better look at the bruise but Chanyeol kept turning his head away so it wasn't visible. His eyes were bloodshot and he was breathing hard, pressing his body against Yifan's in the darkness of the empty library.
During the time they hadn't had the pleasure of the other's acquaintance, Chanyeol had changed from a short-ish, scrawny boy to a tall boy who had built his muscles up on his arms and had overall become wider. He was almost the same size as Yifan. His ears stuck out in between his thick, copper hair, and his big eyes were hooded as if he wasn't quite awake, but not asleep either.
Chanyeol's breath smelled like the icky burnt residue scotch had to offer, his aura smelled like the night, and his clothes were cold from the harsh winds of autumn.
“Yifan, I am a phoenix,” he whispered into Yifan's shoulder and slumped even more. “I'm not a human, I am a phoenix.”
Yifan didn't know what to say, because Chanyeol was obviously drunk and didn't know what he was talking about. “Okay,” he said and adjusted Chanyeol so he could hold him upright more, because his body was sagging and his legs were giving out.
“But if I'm not a phoenix, if I'm just a fake, I don't even have 'human' to fall back on. If I can't be a phoenix, I'm nothing.”
“You can be a phoenix, Chanyeol,” he said and Chanyeol wrapped his arms around Yifan's neck. His breathing was less even than it already was. “Let's get you back to your dorm-”
“No!” Chanyeol was grabbing at his blazer really hard, with iron grips, and shaking his head. “No, I can't go back there. Stay here with me.”
“We can't stay in here the whole night, Lee. Do you want to go over to your father-”
Chanyeol's arms tightened around Yifan's neck and his fingernails dug into Yifan's back as he shook his head and began to cry. “I can't go there either. I don't belong here, Yifan. I don't belong anywhere.”
“You're drunk, Lee. You need to sleep.”
“I can't sleep, the monsters-”
“They won't get you, I'll be right here.”
When Yifan awoke under a bookshelf in the morning, Chanyeol was gone and didn't leave any sort of trace behind, at all. Yifan sat up and adjusted his clothing, and he began to think that he just fell asleep over his books and nothing even happened the night before. But when he went back to his dorm, sneaking passed his roommate at three AM and into the bathroom, he saw eight nail-shaped cuts along the top of his back.
-
It was a week later that Chanyeol went up to Yifan in the library and asked if he wanted to really fly. Chanyeol looked totally different than the drunk, confused boy Yifan had helped earlier; he looked well-rested and calm. Yifan didn't know what Chanyeol meant by his offer, but Chanyeol was staring at him so intensely that he said yes anyway.
They first broke into the warehouse that night. Chanyeol was dressed in jeans and a ragged-looking sweatshirt, and Yifan was still in his school uniform. Chanyeol picked the lock at the side-door and held it open for Yifan. They crept into the massive dark room and Chanyeol flicked a light switch, illuminating a vast, empty cement room.
Chanyeol didn't seem nervous, he didn't even seem to have any feelings at all except for thievery and deceit until the week before. He went to the center of the room and set down his bag before opening it up and presenting three massive volumes and beckoning Yifan over.
“I've been studying, and I think that you just need to do what I do when I summon my phoenix. You just need to think inside your ball and shoot. Tell me, how do you get yourself to float like you always do, maybe that will help me figure out how you're going to do this,” Chanyeol said and looked at Yifan expectantly, his round eyes glimmering in the dim light.
“I, um, don't really know. When I want to fly-I mean float-I just do.”
“So all you need to do is want to soar then,” Chanyeol said and opened up the book in the middle before running his fingers over the pages and mumbling to himself in the weird flame-language he used the day that they first met. After about five minutes of Chanyeol reading and Yifan staring, Chanyeol looked up and wrinkled his eyebrows at the older student. “What are you waiting for?”
Yifan cleared his throat and stepped back before closing his eyes and thinking, imagining himself flying through the clouds at a high-speed, feeling the wind on his face.
Part of the ominous difference between Yifan and Chanyeol is how they manipulate their power. To Chanyeol, it is a ball. He can reach inside the ball, bounce it, throw it, deflate it and then inflate it again; anything he wants to do to the ball, he does. It is easy for him, and he can't understand why Yifan can't do it. Yifan, however, has to imagine the surroundings of his power coming to life, he has to create the image in his mind and feel it on his skin before his power steps in and does the rest. It's why Chanyeol always gets so frustrated, because to him, it doesn't take that much time.
After about three minutes of Chanyeol huffing and waiting, Yifan shoots up into the air. Chanyeol smiled, thinking Yifan would start to grasp things quickly like he did, but then Yifan fell out of the air and screamed as he went down; his back hit the cement, and his head banged against the hard ground, splitting it and making it bleed, which made the otherwise grey and bland room have a spot of color.
Yifan stayed unconscious for about five hours, and Chanyeol sat next to his body the whole time, reading the book about flight and trying to find out what went wrong. Right when Yifan awoke, dizzy and sick, Chanyeol asked him to get up and try again, thus starting the first insane training session of many.
-
“Lee, just-please. You're killing me,” Yifan whispers as Chanyeol comes over to him. He's slumped in a puddle of his own blood, and his body isn't going to move even if it's forced to. He is the definition of exhausted, and he isn't going to get any better without medical help. Chanyeol sits down in front of him and studies him with a look that doesn't have a hint of pity, more a scowl of remembrance.
“You won't die, Wu. You're going to live forever,” Chanyeol whispers, like it's a threat. He smirks with a face full of an unexplainable emotion and his voice cracks, “The teachers value you more.” He gets up and he walks toward the door, his hands on his hips, as he walks to it and then turns slightly to the side. He lifts his arms and holds them out before spinning around with a crude smile upon his face. “Semper anticus, remember?”
Yifan doesn't know where Chanyeol's going with this, but he stays silent nonetheless, because he has a feeling Chanyeol would not like to be interrupted.
“Remember-remember what I said the day we met?” Chanyeol looks right at Yifan and licks his chapped lips. “It's a curse. You're cursed, because no matter how much strain you put on your body, how much pain you have to endure, you aren't going to die until someone outright kills you. And seeing that nobody here likes breaking laws, nobody would but me.” Yifan just stares. He didn't know all of this, he just knew when he stopped growing, his body would stop aging and he'd continue to live, young and pretty, as all of his peers became old and died. “But I'm not going to. I'm going to make you strong and great so you can live out your life for the both of us!” Chanyeol screams and falls to his knees, and the sound of his bones hitting the cement makes Yifan flinch. There's a tear running down Chanyeol's face now, as he looks at the bloody, pathetic mess that is Yifan, and he glares the most deathly glare Yifan ever thought he'd see. “So get up, Wu. It's your turn.”
-
When Chanyeol's hair reached his shoulders, Yifan flew. He flew around the top of the warehouse, and it was the first time he felt excited for months; the overwhelming feeling inside of him's default had become dread. He flew for as long as he could, and when he looked down at his companion, he saw a small smile on his face. The feeling of accomplishment made Yifan want to get everything done more quickly, if this was the reward.
His feet hit the ground when he landed, and he smiled at Chanyeol. Yifan had bruises all over his body, and his lip was bleeding from a previous fall, but he had flew. He thought this was the end of the training, that he had learned how to fly and that would be all he need ed to know, to painfully learn from Chanyeol, who, Yifan had to repeatedly remind himself, was not a flight-master at all. He remembered thinking for a moment that Chanyeol should become a professor, but the thought quickly evaded his mind with a scorn because of Chanyeol's teaching method.
Chanyeol patted his back, packed his books, and they left without a glance back at the warehouse; Yifan thought he was free of the torturous prison it had become and that he would never have to see it's red-stained interior again.
He figured out his mistake when Chanyeol came up to him after a month of bliss and told him he had done more research and Yifan was supposedly able to summon up a dragon from the depths of his being and make it protect him, like Chanyeol had done with his phoenix on the first day the met.
-
The second time Chanyeol showed any sort of emotion other than stern and forceful was when Chanyeol was late to the warehouse door one night. It wasn't just that Yifan got their first and had to wait for a couple of minutes, Chanyeol was hours late and had Yifan waiting outside in the dark afraid to fall asleep until it was well into the night.
When he showed up, he was walking straight, but something about him was off. He seemed to have a small limp in his right foot, and a hand was up at his face. When he came closer to Yifan, to unlock the door with the key he forged, Yifan could smell the familiar iron-smell of blood. Chanyeol opened the door and held it open for Yifan, and he went in silently.
Chanyeol didn't flick on the lights like he always did, so they were in the dark in the room. Yifan didn't say anything, and neither did Chanyeol. The younger teenager took the older's hand and walked them further into the room before kneeling down, and pulling Yifan with him. Yifan sat in the darkness with his legs crossed, and Chanyeol laid his head on Yifan's upper thigh, using it as a pillow.
Yifan hesitantly ran his fingers through Chanyeol's hair, that was just above his shoulder blades, and Chanyeol flinched when Yifan's fingers grazed over a bump on the side, but he was otherwise unresponsive.
There was a warm liquid seeping into Yifan's jeans, and he didn't need to look to know it was blood from either Chanyeol's nose or mouth, or-even though he didn't want to think so-both. He knew better than to ask, so he sat in the dark with Chanyeol all night and stroked his hair and let him cry for the two minutes he chose to.
“Lee,” he whispered when the sun started to come up. His eyes were threatening to close because he was so tired, but he let Chanyeol sleep that night because he thought he needed it more. “Lee, wake up.”
Chanyeol stirred on his lap and grunted, but he was soon sitting up and rubbing his left eye, for his right was swollen almost all of the way shut. The light was still dim, so Yifan still couldn't see the extent of his injuries, but over the course of the night he figured they were probably really bad.
“Yifan,” Chanyeol said gently, and Yifan was surprised how nice his name could sound coming from Chanyeol. He hummed in response, for he was too tired to do anything else. “Wu, please stay for three minutes after I leave, I don't want you to see me.”
He got up and Yifan heard himself limp toward the door and out. Yifan, by then, already knew that when Chanyeol told him to do something, he should, so he waited.
-
“No,” Yifan says defiantly, and even though his voice is weak and scratchy, it is plain how much Yifan means that no matter what Chanyeol says or does, he isn't going to do anything more. Chanyeol keeps glaring at him and cocks his head to the side, a silent “why” being spoken louder than any shout that can come from Chanyeol's mouth. “You work me as hard as humanly possible, and then some, but you don't do anything. Do you even know how it feels to physically not feel your body?” Yifan spits the words out evilly, putting so much hate and hurt into them as he can. He disregards all of the times he's seen Chanyeol beat up and bloody, but he's never dragging himself across the ground, Yifan tells himself as Chanyeol's eyes tear up and his look gets livid.
“I don't know? You don't know!” Chanyeol is screaming so loudly that Yifan spares time for a thought that someone will catch them, but he's quickly distracted by Chanyeol stripping off his denim jacket and throwing it to the side. “You don't know agony, Wu. You don't know how it feels to be hurt.”
Chanyeol takes off his shirt and walks toward Yifan, pointing at his mangled torso. He has burns all over his chest, and his stomach has a huge scar through it, like he was attacked with a sword. He doesn't have nipples, they seem to have been removed. His shoulders are uneven, and when he turns around, his spine is off-center and twisted. “You have no idea,” Chanyeol whispers.
Yifan is silent. It's too much to see Chanyeol like this, because he can't stop imagining how much of that damage was present on the tiny boy he saw walking with determination toward the front of the school. Speaking of that day, Yifan wonders, who was he going to see? But his mind answers it for him, and he realizes a very big detail, even though he knows it's not the whole thing.
“Lee-”
“Stop calling me that!” Chanyeol screams, and fire shoots from his hand and onto the ground, leaving a scorch mark. Yifan looks at Chanyeol with terrified eyes, and Chanyeol continues to look at him with a hard, stone-like face. He seems to have lost all emotions except for rage. His irises are burning again, like they were when he was thirteen and full of pride.
“It's your name-”
“Think, Wu, when did I ever say that was my name?”
-
This is the biography of Park Chanyeol: he was born a crime, and he lived a lie. The end.
-
Yifan graduated from the school with adequate grades, but praise from all of the teachers. He got a badge pinned onto his jacket: semper anticus, it said. It was engraved into gold and mounted on his breast, for everyone to see. Wu Yifan was going to live, always and forever.
Chanyeol graduated from the school with honors and no praise from any teacher. He didn't get any sort of badge, with any sort of engraving. Professor Lee, who was handing the badges out, didn't say anything about scentia est potestas. Park Chanyeol was going to die, that was it.