Runaway Baby

by 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐭 (skyfluff)

Chapter 1: Prologue

The sky above the demon realm was a wound that would not close.
Blue and gold light shimmered there, an unbroken circle—the new honmoon. It hung just out of reach, sealing the human world above from the ruins below. No one could see past it. No one could touch it. Its glow was beautiful in the way that starvation makes bread beautiful: as a reminder of what you will never have.

Ash drifted upward toward it and burned away on contact.

Beneath that ceiling of light, the ground was black glass, fractured and slick with ember dust. In its center burned Gwima—smaller now, a maroon flame hunched low, but still the brightest thing in this realm. He pulsed in slow, hungry beats, each one sending heat rippling out in waves too hot for air but too hollow to warm skin.

The seal had cut him off from human souls. His food. His crown.

The remnants gathered at the basin’s edge. Fewer than before. Always fewer.

Among them stood Mystery and Romance. Neither knelt—because they had forgotten how to be anything but upright—but their bodies sagged, pulled down by the weight Gwima pressed into their bones. No heat reached them. No cold. Only the ache of shame that made their spines bow and their hands still.

The honmoon’s light spilled down over them all, its shimmer reflected in their skin like mockery.

Look at you.

Gwima’s voice was not sound. It was an intrusion—entering where no barrier could keep it out, curling in the deepest corners of the mind.

First, Mystery. His father’s face, carved in disapproval, the kind that spoke without speaking: You’ll never be enough.Years distilled into a single moment of disgust, replayed until the body forgot it was memory and thought it was truth.

Then Romance. The boardroom glare of production executives, their interest stopping where his face ended. Pretty doesn’t last. And neither will you. Casting agents with polite smiles hiding dismissal, scripts snatched away before he’d reached the last line.

Both of them saw the same thing next: a stage under human lights, a sea of fans screaming their names. Then the fans falling silent as life drained from them. Then Huntr/x, swords and voices cutting the moment to ribbons, snatching the souls back. And then—emptiness where the other Saja Boys should have been.

Their shame fed him.

The flame thickened, color deepening toward wine.

The honmoon will break, Gwima said into every head. It will tear, and the human world will spill into my hands again. They will choke on their light and their hope, and I will feed until I am whole.

The maroon light reached toward the shimmering barrier, the flicker of a starving hand reaching for food it cannot grasp.

I still have a piece on the board.

A spray of sparks rose from him, twisting until they became the image of a boy in motion: oversized jacket snapping in the wind, sneakers hitting wet pavement, mouth clamped shut like it had been taught to be. The figure blurred and wavered, the image breaking apart into ash before the shape could turn its head.

He runs, but he runs for me. The pawn will move when I tell it to move. And through him, I will open the way.

The honmoon shimmered overhead—untouchable, unbreakable. For now.

The remnants bowed lower. Mystery and Romance bent further still, the weight in their bones heavier than heat, heavier than cold. Their shame was his leash. Their failure, his chain.

The flame shrank again, curling in on itself. It counted the breaths between now and the moment he would strike.

When the honmoon fell, he would feed until his fire blotted out the sky.

His glow dimmed to a deep, secret maroon. Then, in a voice almost tender, Gwima turned his attention toward the dark edge of the basin.

Isn’t that right, Jinu?

Chapter 2: Chapter I

The sneeze came quick, bending his head forward, a sharp pulse in his sinuses that made his eyes water—not from feeling, just reflex. He caught himself on the sink with a gloved hand.

The mirror was cheap, taped crooked to the wall, warping his outline into something narrower, taller, almost unfamiliar. He held a comb in the other hand, black dye already slick along the teeth. He drew it through the teal strands one slow drag at a time, coaxing them toward the colour of wet asphalt. The smell clung to the air—ammonia, chemical-sweet, heavy enough to taste at the back of his throat.

Didn’t think demons could get sick, Baby thought, not entirely sure why the idea had come to him.

The pink sweater waited on the chair, its diamond pattern softened with wear, holding the memory of warmer hands. He picked it up, the knit collapsing between his fingers. For a moment, he felt the weight of it—not just fabric, but all the places it had been with him, the noise and the lights, the heat of a crowd. That life belonged to someone else now. He lowered it into the bin, the lid touching down with a faint plastic click.

He reached for the gray hoodie, shaking it out once before pulling it over his head. The cotton dragged against his damp hair, catching slightly before it settled on his shoulders. He tugged the hood up and let it shadow his face, leaving only the pale sweep of his cheekbones and the unblinking blue of his eyes in the mirror.

The black mask waited on the nightstand. He looped it behind his ears and felt the shape of himself change—less person, more outline.

The dye timer on his phone sang a cheerful marimba that didn’t belong here. He silenced it and leaned into the sink, rinsing until the water spiralled from blueish-black to gray to clear. Strands clung to his forehead, dripping, darker now, older somehow. He pushed them back and studied what stared back: a boy who could vanish in a crowd. That was the point.

The apartment was quiet except for the hum of the fridge and the occasional complaint of pipes. He tied the garbage bag closed, the pink buried under a knot of black plastic, and slung it in one hand. The hallway outside smelled faintly of dust and cheap detergent; paint flaked from the walls like old snow.

On the stairwell landing, he passed the small rectangle of glass that pretended to be a window. It was too dirty to reflect properly, and he liked that about it. He went down two floors, each step measured, hands deep in his hoodie pockets.

The street was damp without being cold. People passed without looking. He dropped the bag into the bin at the corner and didn’t watch it fall.

When he came back inside, the building exhaled around him. He closed the apartment door softly, sat on the floor with his back to the wall, and listened. Somewhere above the hum of the light, he thought he heard a flicker, the smallest shift of air—there and gone again.

He didn’t look up.

---

Baby left the apartment again when the light through the blinds had just begun to look like morning. Hoodie up, mask in his pocket, hair still damp and dark. The city breathed in buses and kettles and the grit of early deliveries. He kept to the edges, counting crosswalks, palms tucked against the warm seam where his sweatshirt met his ribs.

The shop sat under a dental office that never seemed open, a narrow space with a bell that never rang because the door stuck. He went in through the alley, shoulder to the metal so it would give. Mr. Han was already inside, stacking boxes of instant noodles with the thoughtful care of a man who liked order in an untidy world. A trot melody leaked from his phone speaker—bright, old-fashioned, sincere.

“Ari,” Mr. Han said without looking up, then he did. His eyes took in the hood, the mask, the line of wet hair escaping. “Your hair—it's black, now. Good. That blue" He made a waving motion with his hand, as if dismissing it, "—too loud.”

Hearing the name land in the space between them felt like opening a drawer Baby hadn’t touched in a long time and finding the exact coin he expected. He nodded once. Mr. Han’s gaze lingered, curious for a heartbeat, then moved on—already back to the neat rows he was building.

The work filled itself. Baby cut tape with a boxcutter whose blade always wanted to fold back in. He set bottles on shelves until they made straight horizons. He learned the weight of sacks of rice by the sound they made when he lifted them. The ceiling hummed in the same steady way it always did here, a comfort he tried not to name.

Mr. Han talked the way he always did, which was mostly to the air. He mentioned an aunt who sent him jars of kimchi that were too sour and therefore perfect. He complained that the wholesaler’s new driver couldn’t stack. Every few minutes, he hummed the same four bars of the same song, a tune with a river in it and a promise that felt older than either of them. Not once did he say the names people used on billboards. That was why this place had felt safe the first time he’d walked in—the way the world here faced a different set of stars.

At the counter, an emergency form hung on a clipboard: NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE, CONTACT IN CASE OF— The fields stared up blankly. He wrote Park Ari in the first box and let the pen stop there, the tip leaving a dark dot in the silence of the next line.

When customers came, Baby stepped back and let Mr. Han smile them through cigarettes and lottery tickets, through small talk about the weather and soccer. When the door did catch and ring, the sound was thin and surprised, as if it had forgotten its own job.

On a break, Baby ducked into the tiny bathroom and splashed water on his face. It beaded and slid, leaving no trace. The mirror here was cleaner, less warped. A stranger looked back—features pared down to something cut-glass and even, the kind of skin you get from sleep he didn’t need anymore. The bruised half-moons that used to live under his eyes were gone for good, and sometimes he missed them for the way they made tiredness honest.

Back on the floor, Baby cut down another box. Calendar pages curled at the corners behind the register, days crossed in red. He counted backward without meaning to and stopped before the number turned into a date that mattered.

Outside, a siren rose and fell. Baby pictured a long table under a lamp that was always too bright, hands reaching for bowls without thinking, and pushed the picture away before it finished. People came in with the weather clinging to their shoulders and left without seeing him, which was how he liked it; anonymity done well is almost a kind of kindness—to them, to him.

Mr. Han said later, a nod toward the hair. “You look… clean.”

Baby hadn’t slept. He didn’t say so. “It’s fine,” he said, and meant the colour, the shift, the way his reflection kept losing angles he recognized and gaining ones that kept him safe.

In the afternoon lull, he stocked the back room with cases of canned coffee, the metal clinking in a rhythm he knew by the second shelf. He let his mind do its quiet inventory: exits, faces, mirrors to avoid, the block’s three good hiding places and the fourth that only worked if it was raining. He didn’t think about phones. He didn’t think about headlines or posters or the old habit of checking names on mailboxes. He kept his thoughts on his hands and the work, and the song Mr. Han couldn’t stop humming.

When the light outside thinned toward evening, the bell rang twice in quick succession. A kid in a school uniform bought a pack of stickers and a soda and stared at him the way young people stare at the idea of a different life. The stare slid off. The hoodie and the new hair did their work.

Mr. Han counted out wages in cash at the end, folding the bills with the same care he gave to noodle bricks, and slipped them into a plain envelope. “Tomorrow, same thing,” he said, and then, almost as an afterthought, “Eat. You're too thin, the customers think we underpay.”

Baby almost smiled. “Okay.”

---

The shop’s bell refused to ring as he slipped out the alley door, and the street took him without looking. Closing time had rinsed the block of most people; what was left moved like reflections—taxi light dragging its yellow across wet asphalt, a noodle shop sign pulsing faintly over a shuttered gate. Puddles held scraps of neon and let them shiver. He counted corners the way he always did—left at the laundromat with the humming machines, straight past the pharmacy window where the mannequins never changed, cut through the lot with the bent fence—and tucked his hands deeper into the warm seam of his hoodie, head down, breath steady behind the mask.

Half a block later, it found him. Not a sound, not a shadow—just that taste, dry and gray, blooming at the back of his throat as if he’d breathed in a handful of cold ash. He swallowed and it clung anyway, familiar in the wrong way, reaching backward through his ribs to a night when the sky had burned from the inside. The city’s noises stretched thin around him—bus brakes exhaling, a bottle tipping somewhere, the electrical thrum that lived in streetlights—and under all of it the memory-rasp of cinders, the kind his tongue knew before his eyes did. He slowed without meaning to, recalculating the route in smaller steps, as if walking softer could make a different world happen.

It came out of the seam between two parked cars like a bad thought made visible—too many joints bending the wrong way, hide glossy in patches as if something had tried to molt and failed. The wet street made a mirror of it and couldn’t decide what to reflect: smoke when it moved, meat when it stopped. Each step left a smear on the air, a sour burn that said cut off, starving. Its mouth opened in the place where a throat should have been, a lopsided gash fitted with teeth that didn’t match. Streetlight slid over it and slid off again.

He knew it before he let himself look straight on. The ash taste thickened. The thing’s head swung, hunting; then its eyes—too bright, too many, set wrong—caught his. Recognition stuck like a hook. It dragged a sound up from inside itself, a word that had not been said to him in months and still knew exactly where to hit.

“Baby.”

The warning arrived as motion—someone in a dark hood sprinting hard up the block, boots smacking wet pavement, shoulders set with the purpose of a thrown knife.

Baby drifted toward the alley out of habit, a quiet left he could take without thinking. He would have vanished if the demon hadn’t broken from between two cars and angled for the narrow storefront ahead. To anyone else it read as a man in a bad costume—rubber-slick skin under a torn coat, joints where no tailor would put them—but the wrongness bled through the disguise like dye through cheap fabric.

Mr. Han was bent under the metal shutter, keys in his teeth, attention stitched to the lock. He glanced up just long enough to frown at the oncoming “customer,” then looked back down, misreading danger as nuisance.

The taste hit Baby’s mouth—dry, gray, the scrape of a burned match drawn down his throat. The demon’s arm—too long, hinged wrong—came up in a hooked arc toward Mr. Han’s exposed ribs.

He cut across the curb in two strides. Fingers in the back of Mr. Han’s jacket. A hard yank into the doorway recess. The man stumbled, grunted, his keys skittering, lighter clacking on the concrete.

Claws tore brick instead of flesh. Mortar dust burst and hung like bitter fog. The shutter shivered against its track, rattling the bones of the door.

Mr. Han blinked, peered past Baby at the demon as if sizing up a belligerent drunk in theatrical makeup. “Closed,” he said around his breath, annoyed more than afraid, already reaching for his keys.

The hooded figure reached them in a rush. Up close, there was nothing in her hands—nothing anyone human-sighted could name. But when she moved, the air parted with a clean, cold line, and the streetlight’s glow seemed to break against an edge that wasn’t there.

She cut once. To Mr. Han, it was a girl in a hoodie slicing nothing and the “costumed” man jerking as if yanked by wires. To Baby, it was soul steel taking the demon at the waist, light spilling thin and pale before collapsing into ash. The body staggered, split, tried to hold shape; then the cut decided for it.

Ash hissed across the wet sidewalk, catching in the grates, smearing underfoot. The smell went sharp—hot pennies and old smoke—and then thinned.

The hunter—Zoey, he realized—backed a step, stance steady, eyes raking the scene. Her gaze snagged on him, held. No human should have tracked the invisible blades; no human should have moved at the exact heartbeat the cut landed.

Mr. Han exhaled, irritated, scraping mortar dust from his sleeve. “People these days,” he muttered, and bent to his lock again.

Zoey’s attention didn’t leave Baby. Her hood shadowed her face, but he felt the measure in it—the quick math of risk and recognition. He kept his hands in his pockets, shoulders loose, the ash taste still clinging to the back of his tongue as the street went very, very quiet.

She shoved her hood back and tugged the mask under her chin, breath fogging in the damp. “Hi—sorry—are you okay?” Zoey said in a quick spill, already leaning past him to wave at Mr. Han. “Sir! Sorry about the… performance art. You good?” Mr. Han grunted at the shutter and gave her a look like she was another problem, which she took as a yes with a bright, apologetic nod.

Then she pivoted to Baby, smile still on, eyes sharp as wire. “And you. You saw them.” A beat, head tilt, sugar-sweet tone. “Not the Halloween store reject—my blades.”

He lifted a shoulder, casual as he could make it. “Hard not to.”

“Uh-huh.” She let the syllables soften like a compliment. “So either you’re a hunter, or you’re something I’m supposed to report. And you don’t have the posture of a civilian who stumbled through a stunt.” The smile didn’t move; everything else about her readied. “What’s your unit?”

“Independent,” he said, because it sounded closest to nothing.

“Cute.” She glanced down the street, re-scanning angles, then back to him with another quick, sunshine-bright nod. “Okay! Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re coming with me for, like, ten minutes. We do a hello. You tell me a name that’s probably not your name. Mira or Rumi decides whether you’re a headache or a helper. If you’re a helper, you get snacks. If you’re a headache—” the smile edged, just a hair “—we handle headaches. Nicely. Usually.”

He thought about leaving. He should. Her hand was already on his wrist—warm, polite, unarguable, like a hostess guiding someone to a reserved table. The grip underneath was zip-tie solid.

“Walk with me?” she said, gentling it as if she were asking a favour. “Please.”

He didn’t resist. Curiosity slid in where caution should have stayed.

They cut through puddled light and grocery-sour alleys, Zoey keeping up a reassuring little stream—“watch the step, sorry about the mess, that was clean, right? You moved at the right time,”—and every few blocks her voice flattened for a second as she checked shadows and rooftops with a hunter’s math. The ash taste still hung low to the pavement. He kept his hood down, mask tight, eyes on the path her boots knew.

Windows ahead glowed warm against the damp. He pictured Mira’s mouth thinning, Rumi’s eyes narrowing, their blades making choices in the air. He didn’t know which shape they’d see when they looked at him. He lowered his head and walked into the light anyway.

---

They came in through a side door that stuck halfway and made Zoey hip-check it like an old friend. Warm light spilled over scuffed floors, two couches that didn’t match, a coffee table lined with mug rings like tree growth, and a wall of hooks heavy with jackets and weapon harnesses that looked like hiking gear until you stared too long. The place smelled like detergent, frying oil, and the metallic aftertaste of clean cuts.

“Shoes off—sorry, house rule,” Zoey sang, already toeing hers free. “Welcome to the world’s safest fire hazard. Kitchen’s left, bathroom’s down the hall, if you open the broom closet and it hisses, close it—Rumi’s project, don’t ask.” She flashed him a smile over her shoulder and kept moving. “What do I call you? Please don’t say ‘John.’”

“Ari,” he said, because that was the name Mr. Han used, and because it fit here like a flat stone—unremarkable, easy to skip.

“Ari! Cute.” She pointed him toward a clear spot on the couch as she texted with the speed of an emergency dispatcher. “Two minutes. They’re close.”

He sat where he could see the doors and the windows, hands in his hoodie pocket, mask tugged down to his chin. He ran a quiet inventory: front door (sticky), side door (worse), fire escape (painted shut but not well), kitchen window (latched, easy), hallway (blind corner). Zoey’s chatter was a veil; she used it to herd people, to keep them moving the way she wanted. He could work with that.

Don’t run, he told himself. Running makes a noise.

Down the hall, a soft, familiar hum scraped the air—like a tuning fork struck far away. It found the bones under his ear and flickered there. He didn’t look toward it. He leaned back as if the couch were comfortable and not listing.

You look different enough, he thought, watching his reflection fold in the black TV screen. Hair darker. Angles cleaner. Eyes wrong in a way most humans read as “pretty.” He pictured Zoey’s sunny certainty, Rumi’s practical glance, and a dozen words he could say that meant nothing and everything: freelance, small unit, trained abroad. A few shifts and they’d file him as useful, weird, not urgent. Later he could be a note no one could quite remember.

The latch clicked. Footsteps, two sets. Zoey brightened like a lamp.

“Hey! Kitchen’s clean-ish. Also, surprise guest.” She gestured at Baby as if unveiling a cake. “Found him helping with a, um, fashion disaster outside. He sees blades.”

Rumi came in first, shoulders squared, hair pulled back, eyes doing that efficient sweep of corners before landing on him. Practical. Her gaze caught for a split second—like she’d heard the tuning fork too—and then moved on, cataloging. “Unit?”

“Independent,” Baby said, the word a neutral card on a table.

“Of course,” she said dryly. “Mira—”

Mira entered behind her, wiping rain from a sleeve, expression half-tired, half-listening to something no one else could hear. Up close, she didn’t look like a blade; she looked like the person who picked one up only when it was necessary and always knew when it was necessary. Her eyes slid toward Zoey first—quick check, you okay—then to Baby.

He kept his breathing even. He thought about where the exits were, about the window latch, about how to be a shape that read as helpful and unmemorable. He felt the small lift in his ribs that meant the plan would hold. He could—

Mira stopped two steps into the room.

The hum in the hall thread through the quiet again, thinner this time. She didn’t look toward it. She looked at him, and something old moved behind her eyes like a shadow passing over a lake.

“Ari,” she repeated, testing the name as if it were a coin she could bite. She tilted her head. The room waited for her to be polite about it. She wasn’t.

“Baby,” she said, as casually as naming a weather pattern. “You changed your hair.”

The room shifted by inches, not sound. Zoey’s smile thinned first—still there, but tucked in, like a ribbon pulled through a knot. She stopped hovering, stopped narrating the space, and took a step that put the coffee table between them. Hands tucked into her sleeves. Eyes still bright, now rimmed with wariness.

Rumi set the kettle with more care than necessary. The small, clean click of metal on metal sounded like a line drawn. She didn’t come closer; she circled—quiet, efficient—until she could see Baby from an angle that wasn’t head-on. Suspicion sat in her posture, but something gentler lived under it, an understanding that made her look as if she were measuring pain as well as risk.

Mira didn’t move at all. She held the doorway like a hinge, loose enough to pretend she wasn’t barring it, tense enough that the pretense wouldn’t matter. Her weight was evenly planted; her gaze never fully left him. Ready was the shape she wore.

Baby catalogued all of it. Exits: worse now, psychologically if not physically. Distance: three strides to the window, four to the side door, Mira in both paths without moving. He could break something and make a hole; breaking something would make a noise; a noise would make a record.

Zoey reached for mugs without looking, counted wrong, corrected. “Tea,” she said, softer, like a word that had to reintroduce itself. The kettle began to mutter. Steam cinched the air into something close. She set a mug down in front of him and let it go quickly, as if heat traveled faster for people like him.

Rumi stood a little closer now, close enough for him to catch the faint, not-human hum under her breath. “You’re safe in this room,” she said, not quite to him, not quite to anyone else. A statement, not a promise. Her eyes flicked to his hood, to the mask, to the line of his jaw that the dye had thrown into sharper relief. He knew what she saw; he’d seen it in his own mirror.

Mira’s hand shifted from her side to the back of a chair, then stilled there. “If you run, you’ll be chased,” she said, even, almost bored. “If you fight, you’ll lose tonight and win a rumor tomorrow. Your choice.”

Zoey’s fingers tightened around her own mug. “You don’t… have to do either,” she added, voice neat but not bubbly now. “Sitting is an option.” The corner of her mouth ticked, not a smile so much as a muscle remembering how. Her gaze slid over him—hood, mask, hands—then back up, steady. “Sit.”

He listened to the hum in the hall—the sword’s far, thin note like a held breath—and set his shoulders down a fraction. He pulled the mask to his chin, not farther, and let his hands come out of his pockets to wrap the mug. The heat didn’t register, but the gesture worked. Bodies read bodies. Sitting looked like staying.

Rumi exhaled once, quiet approval or relief; it was hard to tell. Zoey’s stance eased by degrees, never fully. Mira blinked—permission to breathe, not to relax.

Baby sipped because that was what you did with tea, let the steam fog his lashes. He kept his eyes on the table’s ringed surface, memorizing the pattern of circles like a map, and conceded the smallest thing he had to give: stillness. He could be a piece for a night if it bought him the angle he needed.

Zoey leaned her hip against the counter, watching him as if learning a language in real time. “Okay,” she said, careful. The pep was gone; something sharper had taken its place. “We’ll… keep it simple.”

Mira’s fingers left the chair back. “For now.”

Rumi nodded once, like a truce signed in pencil.

He set the mug down without clinking it. Outside, the city moved on, soft and wet. Inside, the board arranged itself around him, and he let it—just this once—without touching a single piece.