Hell's Princes, Earth's Kings - ATEEZ Reader Inserts

The King of Spirits - Yunho

Three harsh knocks meant I had to drop whatever I was doing and rush to the door like a bat out of Hell. Mere seconds made a world of difference in Yunho's transformation from human to demon.

I threw my door open to find him in the middle of turning. He was balled up on the floor with his fist in his mouth to keep his cries muffled. His fangs had gouged holes in his sleeves and no doubt his skin judging by the blood seeping through the fabric. His shirt was pulled tight against his chest, hardly containing his wings as his glowing purple eyes stared up at me in desperation. The adrenaline always assisted in lugging him inside.

The moment I shut the door, a loud, pain-filled shriek echoed through my apartment; loud enough to be heard by my neighbors but bizarre enough to be brushed off as a TV being too loud. His phantasmal wings ripped away his shirt, exposing the bloody wounds he had given himself in the time it took me to get to him. He rolled to his back as his vision was lost to whatever petrifying flashback was playing through in his mind. His hands clenched into fists and his claws tore straight through his palms. He trembled and reacted to things that weren't there. He mumbled incoherent speech patterns that were always new but eerily familiar.

I dropped to my knees beside him, got as close as I could without touching him, and spoke in the softest voice I could manage, "Yunho...Yunho I'm here. You're safe. You're on Earth now. Whatever you're seeing isn't real. Your brother Jongho brought you here. He takes care of you. I take care of you. You're safe."

His head fell back against the floor, tears continued to stream down his pale cheeks, and his overgrown hair fell in front of his eyes. He pulled his claws out of his own skin and spread out his hand; a gesture that usually indicated he could hear me and needed something to ground him in reality. Blood gushed from his self-inflicted wounds as I cradled his palm.

The King of Spirits. The Third Prince of Hell. In all my years of hearing stories of beings like him, I never thought I could pity one so deeply. True damnation must be the life he lives now that he resides among humans. As the ruler of souls, he is capable of feeling the sorrow of any being in his vicinity. For a being that has been incapable of emotion for an eternity, it's torture. And it's turned him into a recluse. He wouldn't dare take a leisurely walk through the city, it would be too easy to encounter a wounded soul. The times he's knocked on my door like this usually follow his attempts to run out for food or supplies of some sort.

I don't even remember why I was so sad the first night I encountered him in the elevator. Maybe I was heartbroken. Maybe I just had a really bad day. I don't remember. It seems so irrelevant in comparison to what happened to him. Watching Yunho drop to the floor in agony and transform into an otherworldly beast for the first time was enough to wipe my memory of whatever problems I thought I had that day.

Now that he'd been following my advice and trying to get out more, him barging into my apartment mid-transformation was becoming a regular occurrence. Maybe it was cruel to encourage him to confront the pain that reduced him to this. But maybe it was just as cruel to let him sit in his apartment and rot.

"Yunho. You're going to be alright. Why don't you try to relax your breathing? Take a big breath until you feel it in your tummy..."

I placed a hand over his ribs, just above where he had his tail wrapped around his torso, and did my best to soothe him. Having spent his entire life as a demon, the concept of fight or flight was very new to him, and he struggled more than the average human to come out of it.

"Take another deep breath, Yunho."

I struggled to place an age on him. Physically, he looked to be in his early twenties. He'd been on Earth for two or three years according to his brother. But he'd existed in Hell almost as long as mankind has existed on Earth. In some ways, he was like caring for a child, but in many ways, his wisdom was beyond anything I could comprehend.