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When Wonwoo falls again, he wakes up in a hospital bed.
He’s not really sure how he ended up here, but he can’t find it in him to complain or ask questions. The mattress is comfortable, there’s just the right amount of sunlight coming in through the window, and the sparkling white room he’s placed in smells like freshly done laundry and disinfectant. The pillows propping him up are just solid enough to hold him up almost at a ninety-degree angle but soft enough to let his head fall back and rest on them without cramping up the base of his neck. The coolness of the blanket seeps through his skin like it had just been replaced, and there’s a very faint beeping noise somewhere to his left, which gets louder as he opens his eyes fully.
His vision is slightly blurry, probably because of the fact that he isn’t wearing his glasses. He doesn’t know where they are, but he doesn’t bother to get up and look for them, blinking a few more times to try and get his eyes back to their normal moisturized state.
He’s confused. With every shut of his eyes, he tries to reach back into his brain and find something, anything, that could have contributed to him waking up in this new environment. But there’s nothing, his thoughts switching between strange distorted images and faces with no face and the familiar black void that’s behind his eyelids. He doesn’t like this feeling, he decides. It’s scary and unusual and something he’s definitely not used to. He opens his eyes again after another failed attempt to try and remember something of use , and his heart is beating a little faster than it was two minutes ago, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.
Something’s not right, he’s sure of it. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but the dread bubbling in his gut suggests that he’s in this room and laying in this bed for all the wrong reasons. He swallows the panic rising up his throat and parts his lips, wishing he can call for help, for anything that might stop this terrible feeling, but no sound comes out, and he feels like throwing up.
His hands begin to tremble and he digs his nails into the bed, the tips of his fingers turning white from the force he’s pressing down onto the mattress. He gasps for air but it feels more like water being poured down his throat and he chokes, sending a wave of nausea crashing over him. He wants to shut his eyes, do something to try and help the panicking, to escape, but he doesn’t want to face the same void that he was just drowning in a few moments ago. He’s afraid he’ll get lost in it forever if he does. His legs flail involuntarily and the beeping coming from his left intensifies, the sound filling up the room and blaring like a fire alarm.
His heartbeat is so loud in his ears that he doesn’t realize he’s screaming his fucking lungs out, and he doesn’t hear someone hurriedly burst into the room, the bang of the door ricocheting against the wall sounding like a gunshot. And before he knows it, there’s two strong hands on his arms, holding them down to the bed and forcing him to stop clawing at the skin on his neck and face.
Wonwoo wants to fight back. He wants to break free, but he’s weaker than his opponent, who easily overpowers his frail attempts to escape with an iron grip. It goes on like this for what seems like forever (but was more like three minutes), his throat almost raw by the time his panic attack finally subsides and he’s left sweaty and panting like a dog in 100-degree heat. His vision is swimming and doing somersaults, tiny black dots mixed with strange colored blobs flitting across his window of sight that’s both narrowing and widening at the same time.
The fact that he doesn’t know what’s going on is undeniably much, much scarier than anything he’s feeling at this very moment. With every blink, no matter how quickly he closes and reopens his eyes, he’s brought back to the void, inching closer and closer to him, threatening to suck him up and keep him trapped in its dark clutches until he turns to dust. He tries not to close his eyes anymore. He tries not to scratch at the hands still holding him down. He tries not to think about the fact that he can’t remember how he ended up here and how he can’t recognize the voice that’s yelling in his ear, telling him to stop crying and to please calm down please for the love of god please calm the hell down.
After what feels like a lifetime, his pulse returns to normal and he’s left laying on the bed like a deadweight. Whatever energy he had before the entire spiel is now gone and he accepts it, letting his limbs go limp and slackening his entire body like a rag doll. The only thing he’s aware of at the moment are the two hands that are still gripping his arms, not as hard but with the same concerned squeeze he felt when they first took a hold of him. He’s out of breath. His pillows are knocked to the floor haphazardly. His sheets are all twisted between his legs, and his breath hitches with every sob that his hoarse throat produces.
“You’re okay,” A deep voice on his right hums, the hands on his arms letting go and moving up to ruffle his hair soothingly. “Wonwoo, please stop panicking. You’re fine. You need to calm down.”
Wonwoo? Is that what his name is? He wants to take a moment to think about how he can’t even remember what his name is (what kind of normal human being doesn’t remember their own name?), but he stops at the sound of the voice and the soft touch of the hands in his hair. Everything is so familiar; the name he was called, the voice, the touch, the tone, yet he can’t find anything to pair them all with. It’s as if his brain is paralyzed. No matter how much Wonwoo screams at it to make a connection to something, nothing happens and he’s left back at square one. He wants to panic again, but the mystery person won’t let him, and he once again becomes conscious of the fact that he does in fact have working eyes.
He blinks once, twice, and on the third he turns his head to the direction that the voice came from, squinting a bit to try and closely analyze the tall man’s face.
He’s met with a strong, sharp jaw and beautifully defined face, whose thick eyebrows are downturned with worry. The man’s features are perfectly chiseled and everything, every inch of him, just fits together like a puzzle, like a very handsome jigsaw. He’s slim but muscled and Wonwoo now understands why fighting back was out of the question, thick biceps staring him in the face and seemingly casting a shadow over him.
Mystery Man frowns but his face relaxes with relief at the same time. “Wonwoo, what are you staring at? Is there something on my face?”
Wonwoo. Now he’s sure that’s supposed to be his name. Why can’t he remember?
Wonwoo blinks slowly like a cat trying to show affection and takes a deep breath in, gaze not moving from Mystery Man’s face. He licks his lips, opens his mouth, and lets it hang open before asking the only thing occupying his mind, the question that’s practically burning on the tip of his tongue.
“Who are you?”
Wonwoo almost misses it, but the Mystery Man’s face falls immediately. The look in his eyes shifts from confusion to a kind of sadness, but more somber, as if he were used to the question being asked. Wonwoo starts to regret his decision; he hates seeing Mystery Man’s handsome face distorted by a sad one, and he hates that look in his eyes. But he had to ask. His brain wouldn’t let him hold it back.
As if on cue, Mystery Man shakes his head quickly and to Wonwoo's relief, his expression changes to a slightly less grave one. He rubs his eyes and cracks his knuckles awkwardly before answering. “Wonwoo, it’s Mingyu. Kim Mingyu.”
When Mingyu speaks, it’s like an electric shock all throughout Wonwoo’s system and he physically jolts a little at the name. Mingyu? Min-gyu. It does ring a bell, but it’s like a muffled doorbell someone hears from a closed room on the opposite side of a house, away from the front door. This is another one of those things that he just can’t put his finger on and it’s driving him crazy. Why can’t he remember anything?
He tries to swallow back the lump in his throat but it doesn’t go away, and he really, really doesn’t want to start crying again, so he sits up abruptly, forcing the tears brimming his eyes to retreat back into his eye sockets. In the process of sitting up, though, the blood pumping through his body doesn’t reach his head in time, and he would’ve fallen out of the bed entirely if Mingyu didn’t catch him with those gorgeous arms of his.
“Woah,” Mingyu says worriedly, and Wonwoo slumps against his arm dizzily. “Careful. Take it easy.”
They stay like that for a bit, Mingyu practically holding Wonwoo in an awkward half-embrace while Wonwoo tries to get his sight back to normal and prays that the fuzzy gray mass flooding his vision would go away. His head feels like a TV with no channels, the mindless crackle of static being the only thing filling up the inside of his skull.
“-woo. Wonwoo. Wonwoo? Are you okay? Wonwoo!”
Wonwoo’s eyes fly back open at the sound of Mingyu’s panicked voice, which is weird because he didn’t know they were ever shut.
“Jesus Christ, Wonwoo. You scared the shit out of me. Don’t be falling asleep like that! One day you might hurt yourself…or worse…”
Wonwoo peels himself off of Mingyu’s muscular arm and looks up at the latter with a dazed grin. “Ssssorry…”
Mingyu sighs. He’s not entirely sure what to do with Wonwoo right now; he’s only seen the boy like this a few other times in his life since he was diagnosed with dementia and eventually Alzheimer’s. It was a rare case, the doctor had said; it wasn’t every day that a healthy man in his early twenties found out that he was cursed with a brain-eating disease. Mingyu thinks that that day will haunt him forever, even when he’s dead and rotting away in his grave a hundred, a thousand, a million years from now. He can confidently say that it was the worst day of his life, even worse than the day where Wonwoo had first forgotten Mingyu’s face (that was a close second), since he’d been expecting it since the diagnosis. It still came as a shock, though—Wonwoo had walked into the kitchen that morning and freaked out and called the cops because he wasn’t sure what a “random tall man” was doing in his house. And when Mingyu explained the situation to the confused officer on his doorstep, the officer had given him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and told him to “hang in there,” leaving with a sigh and a “false alarm” phone call back to the police department. It took way too long to calm Wonwoo down after the whole incident, and he had hysterically cried the entire time, an excruciating three hours of “No, I am not a stranger” and “Yes, honest to god I’m your boyfriend” and “Please stop crying this is normal for you.”
At least, Mingyu thought bitterly, this situation is nothing like the first time. Wonwoo’s learned to calm down after forgetting things, and for that Mingyu is eternally grateful.
He looks back at Wonwoo, who’s sitting up in bed staring at a random spot on the wall behind Mingyu, and sighs again, bringing his hand up to the back of his neck sheepishly. “Wonwoo? You feeling alright?”
Wonwoo’s eyes move before the rest of his head, and he doesn’t reply, instead staring directly at Mingyu as if his life depended on it. He blinks once, twice, batting his eyelashes with each movement, and Mingyu’s face flushes red at the fact that Wonwoo is blushing like an idiot.
“You know,” Wonwoo slurs, letting his eyes flutter shut for a few seconds before he opens them again and takes in every inch of Mingyu that’s visible at the moment.
“D-do I know what?” Mingyu stammers, and he can’t help but chuckle a little at the fact that Wonwoo resembles a sleepy cat.
“I think…” Wonwoo trails off, eyelids heavy with a sudden sleepiness. “Think…I’m in love with you…”
Mingyu’s heartbeat skips. “Wonwoo…” he takes a second to get it together. As much as he wants to melt into Wonwoo’s sudden confused affection, he needs to act like nothing’s wrong, like this is all a big joke, for both his sake and his boyfriend’s. “What are you talking about? I’m your boyfriend. We’re dating. Of course you should love me…”
Wonwoo’s eyes widen with joy before he smiles, that same old wide toothy grin that Mingyu knows means he’s genuinely happy, and he shuts his eyes again, now unafraid to do so. “I don’t know how that happened, but thank god…”
He leans over the side of the bed and rests his head against Mingyu’s stomach, breathing in his scent which is also faintly familiar, but it again fades into another one of those things that he can’t fully distinguish. He’s okay with that now, though. The fact that he can’t remember anything about his past or how he got to the hospital isn’t so big and scary anymore. Nothing matters more to him right now than the beautiful mystery man, whose name is Kim Mingyu and who is also (apparently) his boyfriend. As he drifts into a gentle slumber, all he sees is Mingyu’s face, it being the only memory that he obtains at this very moment in the vastness of the void behind his eyelids, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.