Angel (BNHAxOC)

1. Angel in Tears

(TW! Bullying, death, cussing, trauma)

The city streets at night were a curious thing. Walking them brought on a sense of independence, enjoyment only to be found in the way the lights of the buildings blinked off the dark sky. But, the price always came with safety, eyes roaming over me, hungry, cruel, starving. Adrenaline rushing through my skin, pounding against my head, thoughts clouding my mind as I wondered what shadowy figure haunted me, preparing to hurt me, if this was the night I became another cautionary tale. 

But of course, the thoughts were always silenced by a simple truth, it didn’t matter. Some people were born to survive, to live, to have futures with white picket fences and happy smiling children, and loving perfect soulmates. The pretty people. The people who didn’t know what it was like, what it was really like, to wake up in the morning and have your limbs like stone, your brain in a fog, your world a question of why did you have to wake up at all? The cruelty of returning to your body and your brain, and knowing you will never escape it. Why do it when every day was repetitive, boring, nonsense. Boys at school yelling slurs, girls talking behind their hands with shadowed eyes, and worst of all, the ones who didn’t notice. Who didn’t see me at all. 

The pretty people don’t know what it’s like to be a ghost. 

And that was what made me ugly. Not my less than pleasant face, or my chubby body, or my strangled greasy hair. It was because I knew what it was like to be a ghost. Because I knew so much more than their peas sized asshole brains could ever dream of. 

The creaking open of a nearby door brought me back from my thoughts as a man with a receding hairline and beady eyes walked out, stopping and smiling towards me. 

And there it was. The hungry, cruel, starving eyes. 

I glared at him before walking away, hands in pockets, eyes up ahead. This time I didn’t blink away into thoughts, like I often did. This time I observed. The doors hiding fighting couples. The lights with silhouetted children, sad and hardened at an early age. The boys outside, drinking beyond their fill in camaraderie but more so competition. Men with a bottle too many, unsure and uncaring if they’ll make it home at all. Woman, with tired eyes and hollowed limbs, limping away from whatever horrors they’d seen. And the many few hungry, cruel, starving eyes. 

But one thing was different this time.  

I had gone towards my apartment, a small safe place, with peeling wallpaper and gray, dull, everything, when choked cries met my ears. Crying was normal, it always was. But this one was different. It wasn’t the strangled sob of a broken person, or a manic scream for action. 

It was fearful, and innocent. 

But innocence couldn’t survive in the world of the ugly. 

So I did something that broke all one million of my rules, and I followed the noise, and I entered the dark alleyway, and I stood staring at a young girl, with puffy eyes and a snotty nose. 

She was pretty. The kind that surpassed the normal. Maybe five or six, in a long stuffy skirt and a perfect collared shirt, both so worn down that it was impossible to tell their original color. 

Her hair was light gray and wispy, pulled into a painful looking bun. She held her knees tight to her as she curled in on herself, eyes shut closed. She looked like an angel. A proper one. 

I turned to leave. I hadn’t any use for pretty people. And they hadn’t any use for me. 

My footsteps left cold echoes in the alley. I prepared to forget it all. Of course though, I couldn’t. Because my eyes swallowed an image whole, an image that burned through my brain like a carving into stone. 

A man, or maybe a boy, laying on the ground, misty gray masking over his open eyes, lips parted halfway, face painted in fear. I knelt before him, first putting my hand in front of his mouth and nose to see if I felt any air. When I didn’t, I hesitantly pressed my fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse. 

There wasn’t one. 

I glanced over at the girl. Maybe she’d seen what happened. It would explain the crying. But then I stopped, and I looked at his eyes again, and something in the gray told me different. Something in the gray told me that that little girl wasn't so pretty after all. 

I turned towards her, my steps careful, not loud, a whisper of a noise, and I knelt down before her. She didn’t notice me for a long while. I didn’t say anything either. I just stared at her, and I wondered what she was, if she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t ugly. 

“Hello.” 

The words startled her as she loudly screamed and jumped back, hitting her head against the brick and holding her hands in front of her face with clenched eyes. 

A small chuckle left my mouth, “You might want to keep quiet, screams aren’t very pretty.” 

Her eyes hesitantly opened, revealing warm brown swimming in and out of black. A small frown met her lips and she pulled back, but she didn’t look at me like most people did. Most people looked at me, and their first thought was, gross. They would think that my lips were too big, my eyes too beady, my nose too croaked, my acne too red. But something in the reflection of her eyes told me she was different. 

“Who- what- who- who are you?” her voice was soft, just a whisper, like a mouse. 

I smiled, holding my hand out to her, “Yuri Saito.” 

Her hands shook violently as they gripped mine, small but surprisingly long, skeletal but in a very beautiful sort of way. I waited for her to respond on her own, but she didn’t. She didn’t seem capable of responding to anything really. 

“Did you hurt that man?” I asked her. 

Her eyes widened, she tried to pull away, she tried to run away, but I held her hand tighter. She was very weak. 

“It’s okay. We all do what we need to do to survive. Lions eat zebras, spiders kill their mothers, viruses consume their host, and we - we hurt to not hurt. He attacked you, didn’t he? He hurt you, didn’t he?”  She looked deep into my eyes for a long moment before nodding. “You have options then. You can stay with his corpse, and pay for your conscience with your life. Or you can come with me.”

She looked at the ground before nodding, standing on wobbly legs as she stared at me, warm eyes of an angel. An angel. Not pretty. Not ugly. But more. More than anyone and everyone. 

We passed by the man, and she stopped still, staring at him with welling eyes as tears flew down her face, not a sound to be made other than the shaking of a wooden bracelet against her wrist. Her lip quivered, and her breaths were heaved in ragged asymmetry. A shiver of anger ran down my spine. Angels shouldn’t cry. 

I gently covered her eyes with my hand, carefully leading her past the sight and past the alley, and past the hungry, cruel, starving eyes in the night. 

“I’m scared.”

“There’s no need to be. Angels don’t get scared.”