No Dogs Allowed

Capitate, Carpus

(hello, ty for your time and for reading, i appreciate you greatly :D the little star is very grateful)

(EDITED) (Note to readers: Some chapters ahead may not be fixed to be in line with the new edits.)

There's an inarguable law of the universe about the conservation of matter and energy, in which it states that no matter or energy can be destroyed or added to the universe, only changed. I think about it now. I think about how even the universe itself, down to its beginning and end, will not lose anything, if it cannot gain something in return.

I was twelve, Seoul coated in the crimson coat of autumn outside a window in a home I'd never leave to a world I'd never see. My knuckles were bloody from my brother's face, my body bruised by his own vicious hands, and the scene outside was dismally echoic of the battery staining my own skin; autumn had wormed its way beneath me, bleeding from the inside out.

My father watched me from the doorway of the little attic I and my mother were bestowed. She wasn't there often, and if she was, you wouldn't know it, her days spent sleeping into madness or maddening herself into sleep. The nurses kept her too sedated for her to do anything else with her time. It left me with nothing but the window, and the wolves.

"There's a scale in the world, Echo." Byungho walked towards me, his footsteps light on cotton slippers, his clothes better fit for a sepia-saturated library than a well-dressed prison. He swiped a finger over the windowsill, blood and dust coming back. "It's why there are Alphas, and why there are Omegas. It's why there is Class I and there is Class III. There's your brother and you."

I rubbed at my neck, where the angry marks of a rope had burned into my skin from my brother's grip. I refused to speak.

"Are you angry?" he asked me. "I would be, if I were you. No one likes being a runt." He reached for my hair. He tightened his grip, not enough to hurt me, but enough to tell me he could. "What a pity."

"Where's Umma?" I asked.

He sneered. I'd gotten everything from my mother, from the shallow slope in her nose to the immovable softness in her cheeks to the narrow turn of her mouth. But she'd let slip once that Elias and I had received my father's eyes: dark things, vitriol and substantia nigra, iodine and ante meridiem ice. Eyes like windows, she'd warn. Eyes for a beast.

I saw them stare into me now. "Is that all you want?" he asked me. "I stand in front of you and you want your mother?"

"What would I want from you?" I snarled.

"More than Umma could ever hope to give you," he hissed, his grip tightening. "You're too naive for your own good, Echo."

"Where's Umma?" I demanded. "I want Umma."

He dropped my head. He got to his feet, towering above me, a wolf poised to strike. He walked towards the window. "You've never seen Seoul, have you?" he asked. "You've barely seen Incheon. It's such a shame, really. You've lived in a world you've never seen for twelve years." He glanced at me. "Would you like to?"

I glared. "Not with you," I spat.

He craned his head. "Why not?" he asked. "I could show you quite a lot." Byungho held out his hand to me. "I could give you so much if you just asked, Echo. If you just wanted." His fingers brushed the black hair from my face. "Don't think about what your mother needs from you. What do you want?"