Act. 8 | Stray Kids Imagines

[these minefields]

Your dress was white and stark against the ruination around you. The flowers Minho had carefully wound into your hair every day smiled, whispering shy welcome against his skin as he rested his forehead against yours. Like a man folded into deep prayer, and you were his hallowed temple. He clutched your cold, clasped hands in his bloodied grip and hoped, with all the remains of his tattered soul.

The faintest breath fanned the side of his face, followed by an impossibly fainter murmur, "Minho..."

That was it. Everything he had ever done, he had done for you. To hear you say his name again, he burned suns and shattered the earth with its doting moon. To see your chest rise and fall with life again.

To right a grave wrong.

He lifted his head and your eyelids fluttered, once, twice, like the timid wings of a bird yet to soar. When you finally looked at him, your eyes were clear, lucid in color, and your voice a stronger whisper. "Minho."

He had forgotten relief and the flavor of joy. All Minho knew was exhaustion, an everlasting fatigue that wracked his body mercilessly and only waned when his anger blazed. That same weariness shook him now, prompting uncontrollable rivulets of crystal tears to streak his cheeks. He was broken in every conceivable way, and yet everything that he was, he was for you.

You had no strength in your limbs but you pushed yourself to sit. And with a gentleness Minho reminisced from what seemed to be lifetimes past, you cradled his face in your hands, voice lilting with concern and love before anything else. "Don't cry, darling."

But he didn't deserve your concern, couldn't you see? Didn't you see the tally of his sins so innumerable that they marred his skin? Didn't you see the bleariness of the sky and the destruction of the earth? Or did you only see him, as he only saw you?

Every word of yours, Minho would obey unthinkingly, but he couldn't stop his tears. So, he lowered his face as if to hide it from your earnest scrutiny. He was so tired, he couldn't find it in himself to speak. Any utterance of his would be naught to the warmth of your touch and the melody of your beating heart, he chose to hold one of your hands instead.

Perhaps to keep it there so he could remember the way it felt to be held by you again.

Closing his eyes, he leaned into your hold. Blood and tears and broken pieces, and he was still wholly and utterly yours for as long as you would have him.

He was the man who fractured the earth and ripped the heavens apart. No deity could ever repent enough for the wrong that had been done to you. He had damned himself and the meaningless world that took you from him—tore you out of his arms as though it mattered not. As though you weren't his soul and his heart and his every breath.

Still, he could hear their tortured wails, ghosts of kingdoms and families and soldiers who stood in his way. The blood he had spilled was enough to fill the oceans, his hands so soaked in it that the crimson imprint lingered no matter how many times he washed it off.

If you wanted him to, he would stop this madness. He would piece the broken earth back together and mend the shredded sky. Only your one word would suffice.

Then, he caught shouts that seemed so distant like they came from the ends of the earth. "There he is! Kill him now!"

Ah. More soldiers, as though the mutilated bodies littered around the both of you weren't a lesson enough. So-called heroes who wanted to hinder his plan. Fools whose destinies of death were sealed the moment they stood in his path.

Minho willed his eyes open, let them drown in the sight of you as his tears faltered. You were always so beautiful. He could crown your head with every star in the universe's infinite expanse and you would still outshine them by leagues.

"My love," he finally said, and the words felt like a sigh of relief. What a shame, he could hear those dead men closing in. Standing up, he held his hand out for you, "Do you trust me?"

You put your hand in his assuredly, and he pulled you up with the kind of soft care one would show a full bloom in the height of spring. The blood on his hand seemed to bother you none. "Always."

With his grief, love, and multiplying sins, Minho had bent the world for you, and he would unravel it at your fingertips again and again because everything he did, he did for you. Always.

Worlds and skies and hells be damned.