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Yeonjun remembered his life in clear-cut flashes.
He’d tried to explain this idea to Beomgyu once. “Like—like my entire life is a film reel with the best quality videos you’ve ever seen, but—but most of it is just burned away. You know? I remember everything from—from a random Tuesday afternoon six years ago, but the last week is just gone.”
Beomgyu had frowned at him. “That’s not an excuse to forget my birthday, hyung,” he’d said softly. Yeonjun didn’t like looking at people’s eyes, but he was intimately familiar with voices that shined with disappointment. It made his heart shrivel.
Yeonjun hadn’t let his frustration show on his face. You’re not getting it, Beom. “I’m sorry,” he’d said instead. “Hyung is sorry. I’ll make you something, I promise.” He’d smiled at Beomgyu and squeezed his hands and tried to ignore how stiff Beomgyu’s responding smile was. He was good at that.
That day, when looking for his yellow paint, Yeonjun had found the half-finished canvas with Beomgyu’s sixteenth written on the side. He’d stayed up all night to finish it. He couldn’t remember if he’d remembered to give it to Beomgyu.
Clear-cut flashes.
Yeonjun stared at his medication bottles.
He couldn’t remember if he’d taken them this morning. He had a weekly container, but it was lost in one of the Boxes, the ones he would rather stab himself than open. Maybe it wasn’t in one of them. Maybe Dad threw it out again. Maybe tomorrow Mom would yell at him about it. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but maybe wouldn’t un-burn that memory between waking up and drying off from a shower that had turned his fingers white with cold.
It wasn’t in one of the Boxes. His parents didn’t go through his Boxes. He screamed at them when they did, and they screamed at each other too much so they couldn’t stand their son screaming at them too, and Yeonjun had been too panicked and too blinded by fear to notice how now he was making his parents flinch back—
Yeonjun didn’t remember exactly what had happened when they tried.
He’d taken one of them. But he had three, and none of them were at a particularly low dosage, so he shouldn’t just take all three and hope for the best, but he couldn’t remember and he was closer to crying than fixing that burned segment of his film reel.
Someone knocked on his door. “Come in,” Yeonjun hummed, wiping at his face with a sweater that felt more like sandpaper than yarn.
No one came in.
Yeonjun uncapped each medication and poured them all out on his desk. Except he forgot to separate the piles, so they all mixed together, a mess of round white and yellow and blue pills that bounced across a table covered in flecks of paint. He stared at them until the tears in his eyes turned the pills into a swirling mess of colors. Then he kept staring, sure that if he moved, if he lifted a single finger, he would take the pills and swallow them all.
If he stared long enough, the pills would sort themselves.
Clear-cut flashes.
Yeonjun reached for a blue pill. Blue was safe. Blue raspberry. Blue like the betta fish.
Yeonjun laughed too much.
It was the first thing anyone noticed about him: the too-wide smile, the mania etched into his eyes. It had been the first thing Soobin noticed about him when he first found the boy dyeing his hair yellow in the school bathrooms. Yeonjun looked at Soobin and laughed, and his eyes had been a little too wide, a little too bright to look normal.
“Do you have a betta fish?” Yeonjun had asked.
It was Yeonjun’s favorite question, one of hundreds of nonsensical questions he liked to ask them and a few dozen that reappeared every so often. In the same way Yeonjun laughed too much, he said too many nonsensical things. Most of the time, Soobin liked those nonsensical things.
“No,” Soobin had told him.
Yeonjun frowned at him, a flash of pure upset in that manic brightness. Then he laughed again. “Okay. Who are you?” He stuck out a hand: Soobin didn’t take it, because it was covered in neon yellow dye, but he did tentatively take Yeonjun’s wrist in an approximation of a handshake. “I’m Choi Yeonjun. Class 2-A.”
“Choi Soobin. 2-C.”
Later, Soobin learned that Yeonjun laughed most often when he’d decided not to take his medications and spiraled into some strange amalgamation of mania and psychosis that was horrifying to witness. Right now, though, Yeonjun was laughing because Kai was chasing him, and Soobin was trying to keep them in his eyesight and not move to avoid Beomgyu’s wrath.
“Is this safe?” he asked Beomgyu distractedly, wincing at a particularly deep jab.
“I haven’t landed myself in the hospital yet!” was the cheerful reply. Soobin scowled at Beomgyu. “Well,” the younger boy amended, “not because of this. And besides, Yeonjun hyung’s is healing just fine.” He wiped the area off with a dry paper towel, ignoring Soobin’s squawk of pain.
“What is it?” Soobin asked, twisting to look. Nothing solid had yet been formed, but there was at least one circular thing.
“I’m trying to do earbuds,” Beomgyu said. Another deep jab earned another hiss of pain. “You know, the ones Taehyunnie bought you.” Taehyun, who nearby was trying to fix the car that had busted earlier, looked up to his name, then turned back to the car when neither Soobin nor Beomgyu elaborated. “Yeonjun-hyung got a cat, and I gave myself a lighter. Haven’t talked the other two into it.”
In the distance, Yeonjun shrieked out a laugh, tackled to the ground by Kai. “Off, off!” he yelled, as Kai struggled to pin the writhing mess he’d captured.
“I don’t know how they still have the energy to do that,” Soobin huffed.
He was going to say more, but Taehyun crowed out a sound of triumph, and the car started with a burst of black smoke and a loud rumble. “I’m a genius!” he yelled in English. “Bow before me, the genius-est of geniuses!”
“That’s not English!” Kai and Yeonjun yelled back, the words broken by a cacophony of laughter. Soobin laughed at Taehyun’s offended expression, then yelped again when Beomgyu stabbed him.
“It’s English now, dickheads!” Taehyun threw the tool he’d been using to the ground just in time for Yeonjun to sweep him up, all too many centimeters whisked off the ground and bundled into an overenthusiastic Yeonjun’s arms. “Hey!”
“That’s my Terry!” Yeonjun said cheerfully, ignoring Taehyun’s efforts to strangle him to be put down. “Hey, Soobin, congratulate Terry for being a genius!”
Soobin exchanged looks with Beomgyu. “I have no idea what he’s saying,” he sighed, and Beomgyu nodded in weary agreement. Another several jabs. “When are you going to be done?” he demanded, halfway to kicking his foot into Beomgyu’s face.
Beomgyu’s face scrunched up. “Like ten minutes?” he offered.
Soobin scowled at him, and therefore didn’t notice when Yeonjun carted Taehyun over to them and dropped him, sitting down and dragging him still screeching back into his lap. “Hi,” he said breathlessly. Kai flopped down next to him and silently began aiding Yeonjun in his efforts to keep Taehyun pinned. Together, they managed to get Taehyun trapped in Yeonjun’s arms with his legs sat on by Kai. “So when are we leaving? I think I remember the way to that abandoned pool like four kilometers off, if you guys want.”
“So you can break the—mmph!” Taehyun glared up at Yeonjun, who stuck his tongue out back. A second later, Yeonjun screeched, yanking his hand away from Taehyun’s mouth. “Soyoucanbreakthecaragain?”
“I didn’t break it!”
“Then who broke it? God?”
Yeonjun pouted at Taehyun. “Well, you fixed it, didn’t you?”
Laughter bled into the air.
The drone of the teacher’s voice had long faded, drowned out by the soothing scratches of pencil on paper. Yeonjun had doodled vines and flowers all around his notes, drowning out anything he’d managed to write in peonies and chrysanthemums and jagged leaves.
“Choi Yeonjun, could you stand to be less useless?”
Eyes on him, eyes in the windows and wood and embedded into the pencil in his hand. Eyes of blue and green, cat’s eyes. They watched him in a glaring taunt.
Yeonjun blinked up at the teacher, who was still saying something about King someone’s political disaster. He looked around the classroom, too, at the people who had learned to ignore him and the ones who still liked staring at the insane kid. None of them were looking at him before, even if his shifting was attracting attention now.
“Do you enjoy making a spectacle?” the teacher’s voice snapped. Her mouth didn’t match her words, though, and Yeonjun squinted at her lips to try and parse out the real words since they seemed to be some kind of instruction. He gave up almost immediately and let his head fall onto the desk. Maybe if he pressed his head into the paper hard enough, the doodles would rise up and grow, wrapping around his head until they suffocated him and turned his corpse into a flowering sculpture.
“They’re all watching you,” someone purred. Blue green cat eyes stared at him, taunting him. Yeonjun tried to burrow harder into the desk and was utterly dismayed when it didn’t work.
His bracelets were turning into cold, thick chains; frost was crawling up his arms. Yeonjun shivered and closed his eyes, unwilling to see that what he could feel to his bones was only a trick of his mind.
Someone nudged his shoulder. Yeonjun opened one eye to the janitor looking at him with scrunched worry.
School had ended hours ago, apparently, and he needed to leave, except none of his classmates had bothered to try to wake him up as they left. He didn’t know what had happened in the interim between being chained to the classroom and being woken up, if anything had happened at all, only that he had to go home so Yeonjun did too.
The janitor helped Yeonjun pack his things, ignorant to the way Yeonjun’s fingers were stiff with false frostbite and freezing chains but not to the frustration caused by how his fingers shook too much to move. Yeonjun thanked him, promised him something painted as a gift, and wandered in a direction he only half-consciously chose.
Yeonjun wandered for minutes-days-hours, letting the cat lead him through the streets and trying his best to forget each glimpse of a street sign. Somewhere along the way, he took his headphones out to try and drown the words around him too.
Yeonjun liked being lost. It was an aching comfort.
He ended up in a construction site, one far away from most of Seoul; the only indications he had of how far he’d walked were his aching feet and the near-dark sky.
Yeonjun… collapsed, sinking into-not-into the dust.
Maybe he would rest here. A little. Let the chains weigh him down, let his body feel the cold his brain was manufacturing.
He woke up to a construction worker kicking his ribs and yelling at him. He woke up again in a hospital, the same construction worker beside him.
The four of them stared at the door to Yeonjun’s apartment with something none of them would admit was unfortunately close to dread. They’d been doing such for nearly five minutes.
“I call not doing it,” Kai said.
“It’s just knocking on a door,” Taehyun sighed, pushing past both Soobin and Kai, ignoring that he too had been standing there with the rest of them. One, two, three knocks.
Footsteps shuffled, and the door opened to Yeonjun’s mother’s haggard face, her hair loose and makeup caked too thickly to properly cover the bruise on her cheek. “Oh, it’s you four,” she said huffily. “Come back later. The boy’s been sitting on the couch for almost a day and a half, and I’ll be shocked if you manage to wake him up.”
Well. If there was anything that could have gotten them away from the door, this was the exact opposite. Taehyun set his jaw and looked at Ms. Chun until she scowled and stepped aside, grumbling something under her breath that Taehyun didn’t bother tuning into. Kai, all apprehension visually gone, pushed past them all to be the first in the door. The other three manage to get in before Kai’s shaky gasp has them all stilling, each of them trying to look over the others’ heads to what had him so startled.
Taehyun knew—in the way he knew every symptom of Yeonjun’s disorders and every use and side effect of his medications, the way he had everything carefully cataloged—that certain awful things were inescapable when one was as unwell as Yeonjun. Hell, even Beomgyu’s issues weren’t inescapable, and he was nowhere near as unwell.
Taehyun, again, was the first one to step forward. Yeonjun didn’t—didn’t look alive, save for a rising and falling of his chest that could be ignored if one wasn’t watching closely. Taehyun was fine with this. Taehyun had manhandled his depressed sister more than once; he could do his best friend.
“Yeonjun hyung,” he called, a little louder than was strictly necessary. “It’s us.”
Yeonjun blinked slowly. Soobin sucked in a quiet breath when the older boy’s head turned towards Taehyun. “Hey,” he said vaguely. He smiled, and it almost looked real. Then he winced. “Mom and Dad are yelling,” he whispered. Like a secret, shared between him and Taehyun. He didn’t seem to notice the other three. “So we have to be quiet.”
“Hyung,” Kai said. His voice wavered. “Hyung, no one’s yelling.”
Yeonjun shushed him. “Quiet.” He sat up a little straighter, tried to get off the couch, but fell back with a look of upset surprise on his face. “Ow.”
Taehyun stepped closer and held an arm out. “You’ve been sitting for a while, hyung.”
“No, I haven’t,” Yeonjun refuted immediately, though he did grab Taehyun’s arm to pull himself up. He frowned, the upset now a little clearer. “Taehyun-ah, there’s thorns in my bones. It hurts.”
Soobin, who until now had been silent, cleared his throat. “I’ll go make ramen,” he said, backing into the kitchen. Kai, with a guilty glance that Taehyun ignored, followed.
“The vines grew because you sat too long,” Taehyun said. Best not to break too much of reality to him. “You need to move so the thorns dislodge.”
Yeonjun leaned on him a little too much, his eyes still unfocused. Taehyun put one arm around his waist and used the other to grip his forearm. “The thorns won’t dislodge,” he mumbled. “They’re growing in my blood.”
“Let’s dance, then, hyung,” Beomgyu piped up. He scurried to Yeonjun’s other side, taking some of Yeonjun’s weight from Taehyun. “You like dancing, right? Dancing will make you feel better.”
Yeonjun smiled faintly. “I do.” He straightened a little and pulled back from them to stand unsteadily on his own. Taehyun held one of his arms just in case, but it was a relief to see him standing at all.
“Then dance with me,” Beomgyu said. “Come on!” He grabbed Yeonjun’s hands and pulled, sending him stumbling forward into Beomgyu. “I learned how to waltz last month,” he continued, arranging a barely resisting Yeonjun into position. Taehyun, his arms free, pulled his phone out to record. “I don’t think any other agency teaches its trainees classical dance, but we were all awful at it. San stepped on his partners’ feet so many times the instructor benched him. And then Wooyoung started stepping on my feet to get benched with San, except it didn’t work and my toes are still freaking sore.”
Yeonjun laughed, letting Beomgyu drag him back and forth. Taehyun zoomed in on his face, on the way his eyes were still hazy but they were here.
The blood in his veins wasn’t the color it was supposed to be. Usually an absentminded thought more than anything else, a belief supported by the purplish hue of his veins and kept hidden so the doctor he hated going to wouldn’t cluck at him and babble about another psych ward visit. Sometimes, Yeonjun even painted over his veins, delicate little lines that made him hum with delight.
He was painting now, deep purple lines over his throat that ran down his skin and stained the thin white shirt he was wearing. Vines already covered most of his skin, and he watched the liquid purple smear through half-dried green and brown, looked at a reflection in the mirror that was slowly becoming less and less human to eyes attached to a brain that could never distinguish the reality everyone else wanted him to be tethered to. That was fine. Yeonjun wanted to be a living painting. Something unreal.
Yeonjun’s hand twitched and the brush slipped from his fingers. He didn’t notice: instead, he pressed his fingers to the purple on his throat, the ugly gash that was too surface level, not real enough.
His nails scrabbled at the skin of his throat, at the points just to the left and right of his trachea. It smeared the purple even further. Yeonjun hated it, suddenly, overcome with a vicious fury that hurt so much it nearly knocked him off his feet.
There was a knife hidden in one of his Boxes. A knife that could carve him open so he could see the purple blood and it would feel hot and thick instead of cold and watery like the paint covering too much of him. A knife he shouldn’t have.
Yeonjun couldn’t look away from the mirror to get that knife, or even bear the thought of looking for it. But he could reach for the scissors on his dresser. Fabric scissors, to rip holes into his clothes so the vines could breathe or to cut off the hospital bands.
Yeonjun’s hands shook. The scissors clattered against each other, and when he pressed one tip against his throat the metal felt like fire and ice. The air was suffused with the heavy, cloying smell of blood and paint, mixing together to create a feeling that had Yeonjun swallowing down bile, the scissors pressing ever closer to his throat with the motion of swallowing.
Yeonjun pressed, hard, and red welled up to mix with purple.
He stared.
The scissors dragged themselves across the rest of his throat. Red pulsed from his skin, drowning the purple out in thick, hot rivulets.
Yeonjun let out something that might have been a whimper. He set the scissors to his wrists, and red pulsed out again. The pain was sharper this time, chemical paint leaking into the deeper cut and making it sting, but the color was still the same.
“No, no, no,” he heard himself mutter, as if from a distance. “This is wrong.” Someone—someone must have changed his blood. The red fruit punch in the fridge must have dyed his skin. Or someone must have replaced his blood while he slept. Something, anything to prove that the red swirling across his skin and dripping to the floor wasn’t his.
Yeonjun curled into himself, pressing his bleeding arm against his bleeding throat, and cried.
This was wrong.
Pause for laughter.
The party had been Beomgyu’s idea and the sacrificial lamb Soobin’s house. Beomgyu had argued that it was because Soobin was the only one with a house (ignoring that Kai did too, it was just offensively far), even though it was mostly that he knew Soobin would rather swan dive into concrete than say no to them.
It was impossible not to notice Yeonjun’s spaciness, but Beomgyu had been content with ignoring it for the first while, as they made cookies and Taehyun yelled at them for spilling half a bag of flour across Soobin’s kitchen. Beomgyu slid the rack of cookies into the oven while Kai argued adamantly for a Studio Ghibli movie against Soobin’s protests that they’d watched those so many times he’s memorized them, Kai-ya, please let them watch something else—
When the timer dinged, Yeonjun went to open the oven, but stopped right in front of it. Beomgyu watched him stand there for several seconds, watched his hands twitch and his head tilt. Beomgyu was just about to step over to him when he looked back at Taehyun, smiling absently, and asked for a glove.
The cookies were only a little burnt, and Kai broke off from his argument with Soobin to try and snatch one from the rack. Yeonjun whacked him with the glove. “Nope, Beomgyu first.”
Beomgyu beamed and took the one Yeonjun offered him. He bit into it. “It’s not bad if you ignore the burnt bits,” he said through the mouthful of sugar cookie.
“Of course they’re not awful, I made them,” Taehyun snapped over the last part. “With no help from you louts.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Beomgyu said primly, swallowing. “I don’t speak fancy.” Taehyun eyed him for approximately two seconds, then bared his teeth in something halfway threatening and turned away with his nose in the air. Yeonjun ruffled his hair; Beomgyu smiled up at him.
The squabble over the movie sparked up as soon as Kai dumped the rest of the cookies into a bowl to share on the couch. Kai was holding the cookies away from Soobin until Soobin agreed to Spirited Away; Soobin was begging him for something else. Yeonjun had The Secret Life of Pets on the TV before either of them resolved their squabble, and Beomgyu joined him on the couch still laughing at Kai’s betrayed expression.
“Any cats here?” he asked.
Yeonjun smiled back. “Only a few.” Beomgyu frowned, but a few weren’t too bad, he reasoned. A few were better than blue-green. Yeonjun poked Beomgyu’s forehead before the thought could spiral. “Cat got your eye?”
“Not yet!” Beomgyu said, with much more cheer than he felt. He even gave Yeonjun an exaggerated wink with the half-blind eye in question.
“What nonsense are you two on,” Kai whined, sitting down and arranging himself between Beomgyu and Yeonjun, “quit talking and watch the stupid movie.” Taehyun shoved at Kai’s head and sat on the floor by Beomgyu’s feet; Soobin came and settled by Yeonjun’s feet, hushing them all. Yeonjun asked him if the oven was off: Soobin assured him it was, which seemed to settle Yeonjun somewhat.
Pause for laughter.
Beomgyu couldn’t see Yeonjun properly, not with Taehyun in between them, but he saw when Yeonjun turned back to the oven (who had left it open?), and watched him stare at it for several minutes. He only looked back when Kai yelled for a few pictures, something missing in his face.
Pause for laughter.
Yeonjun shrieked, shoving Beomgyu away from himself. “Gross!” he yelled, scrabbling away to hide behind Taehyun. Beomgyu and Taehyun shared a smile; before Yeonjun could get away, Taehyun twisted, grabbed at Yeonjun’s arm, and shoved him toward Kai. Beomgyu dumped the entire blender of mushed strawberry over his head before he could get away, and laughed so hard his stomach ached at Yeonjun’s wails of despair. Kai, having absconded safely with a few intact strawberries, shouted for Yeonjun to get his revenge.
“Guys, I still need to clean this up—” Soobin tried, but stopped when Beomgyu and Taehyun turned towards him too. He backed up, hands in front of him, his expression wary. “We can talk this out—”
Beomgyu lunged first.
Pause for laughter.
The fight lasted for several minutes: when Beomgyu ran out of strawberries, he grabbed a bunch of tomatoes from Soobin’s fridge and started throwing those instead. One nailed Taehyun in the chest, and another burst over Kai’s hair. Beomgyu didn’t even notice when Yeonjun disappeared, preoccupied with escaping Taehyun’s wrath.
Soobin’s lucky shot at Taehyun’s head bought Beomgyu just enough time to scramble into a spare bedroom and lock the door behind him. He fell onto the (clean, white) sheets, laughter still bubbling up his throat.
Pause for laughter.
“Is this a joke?” Beomgyu asked, voice wavering. Fire roiled in his stomach and charred his bones; it flickered in the vision he no longer had. “Choi Yeonjun, tell me this is a joke.”
“Why the fuck would it be a joke?” Yeonjun spat. He curled his arms around himself, glaring at Beomgyu like for all the world it really was Taehyun’s corpse behind them both. “Fucking murderer.”
“Fuck you too!” Beomgyu snapped. He stepped forward, shoving down the guilt when Yeonjun flinched back, still burning with fury-confusion-hurt. He stepped forward again and grabbed Yeonjun’s arm when his hyung made to step away. “You don’t fucking get to run away from this. Explain, now, or I’m never talking to you again.”
Tears rolled down Yeonjun’s eyes. “Your shoulders,” he whispered. “Your shoulders have spikes, Beomgyu. You suffocated him and hung him on the spikes.” He tried to jerk his arm out of Beomgyu’s hold, but Beomgyu tightened his grip enough to see Yeonjun suck in a sharp breath.
“Choi Beomgyu, Choi Yeonjun, what the fuck.”
Yeonjun seized Beomgyu’s distraction and yanked his arm away, shoving Soobin aside to run out of the room. Soobin, livid where Beomgyu had barely seen him angry, whirled around and took off after Yeonjun.
Pause for laughter.
Beomgyu leaned against the doorway, staring at the road where Yeonjun’s car had disappeared. His hands were sticky with strawberry blood.
The car was on fire, a heaping mess of melted metal and burning gas.
Except it wasn’t, because no one on the street was screaming, and Seori was still talking as if nothing was happening. Yeonjun watched the flames anyway, black smoke curling around yellow-and-orange-and-sometimes-blue flickers.
“Yeonjun-ah,” Seori said. “Yeonjun-ah, pay attention to me.”
“I am,” Yeonjun protested, turning to her with a thin smile. “You were talking about your ex-boyfriend. Again,” he added, his smile widening into a grin. “I still say we go kill him.” He meant it, too. It made perfect sense to murder this boyfriend Seori kept whining about—though he’d only met Seori a few hours ago and had more attachment to the burning car—and damn the consequences. “Throw him in a fire, maybe? On the stake.”
Seori smiled sweetly at him, waving her ice cream bar in his face. “Aww, sweetheart. If you can find his grave, feel free.”
Yeonjun’s smile died. He was sure the ex was still alive, remembered distinctly that she’d been using present tense just a minute ago. Seori, oblivious to his crisis, kept eating her ice cream and chattering about how horrible he was (how horrible he is, she was saying).
Habit, surely. Yes, he decided. After all, he talked about his friends like they were still alive sometimes.
He pouted instead. “Find better boyfriends next time, Noona. You have terrible taste in men, and it shows.”
Seori stuck the last bite of ice cream in her mouth. “Why? The terrible ones are cute.” She winked at him. Yeonjun blushed. His insides felt like they were being squeezed out of a piping bag, and turning back to the burning car was the perfect way to avoid parsing out what emotion the piping bag was made of.
Wistfully, he thought of Kai’s over-frosted cupcakes.
“Are you going to eat your ice cream?” Seori asked. “We stole them together, remember?” Yeonjun glanced down at the half-melted chocolate bar on the sidewalk between them and shook his head. She frowned at him and reached for the ice cream. “Suit yourself.”
There were thorns under his skin, and every second he stayed still they dug deeper into him. He stood up and swallowed the scream caused by hundreds of tiny thorns dislodging themselves. “Come on. How do you feel about robbing a bank?”
“Oh, we’re that close?” Seori laughed and it sounded wrong. “Not a bank, methinks, but there’s a money exchange place a few blocks from here if you wanna take your beloved car for a mini-joyride. I hear getting chased by police is a hell of an adrenaline booster.”
“Perfect,” someone said, laughing. Perfect, perfect, perfect compounded around them in hundreds of echoes until it no longer sounded like a human voice. Seori grinned, and Yeonjun tried to regain control over his own voice, and the burning car exploded again, this time loudly and brightly enough to catch two passerby in the fire. Their screams joined the echoes piercing Yeonjun’s eardrums.
Yeonjun swung into the front seat, Seori into the passenger. Flames licked at his skin, metal melting onto his limbs, but he twisted the key and the engine revved in the sudden absence of the roar of fire.
Behind them, two unopened bars of chocolate ice cream slowly melted on the pavement.
Yeonjun had been missing for four weeks now.
Kai tried not to sweep the floor too aggressively while thinking about it. His manager had already scolded him twice for looking too angry at the customers, Huening, you’re going to scare them off, like his friend wasn’t missing for longer than he ever had been following the worst fight they’d ever had.
The last communication any of them had from him was something he sent to Kai, a photo of the Seoul skyline and the message you like flying, right? from exactly twenty-nine days ago. The photo was Kai’s lockscreen and the message was still just as nonsensical every time he looked at it.
Yeonjun went missing sometimes. He’d gone missing just a few months after Kai had met him, for just under three weeks, then ended up hospitalized for a month after (that was how they’d met Beomgyu: as Yeonjun’s hospital friend). He’d gone missing again a few weeks ago, and come wandering back three days later mumbling about construction sites and cats. Sometimes he would disappear into himself, and it was like he was really gone. It was awful every time, but it had at least become something halfway expected.
He’d never been missing this long.
Kai swept at the next tile with much more force than necessary. His head buzzed too loudly, and his wrists ached from gripping the handle too tightly. Work was grating at the best of times, but every shift for the last two weeks had dragged.
Sweep, sweep, sweep.
His fingers refused to uncurl when he was done, clenched so tightly around the handle that it hurt more to try to move them than it did to just grip the handle harder. Finally uncurling them felt like breaking the bones in each finger, lancing pain shooting through each digit. Kai swallowed back a few curses in Portuguese and shoved the broom back into the storage closet.
Lea had offered to pick him up (maybe worried about how much time he’d been spending out at night), but Kai had refused. Some misplaced hope that walking through Seoul’s streets would put him in Yeonjun’s path, maybe. But it had been weeks, and Kai’s legs ached, and he didn’t even fucking know if Yeonjun was in Seoul at all.
Kai left the café feeling just as twisted as he had entering it.
He walked for a little while, one earbud blasting one of the many playlists Taehyun mixed for them and the other hooked around his ear. His eyes flickered to each face, trying to find familiar features in any of them, though after so long it was more halfhearted than he’d ever admit to himself. Even taking another completely roundabout route brought him no more hope.
Police sirens were drowning his music out. Kai took out one earbud, looking around to try and pinpoint the direction of the quickly swelling noise. As he did, police cars raced in front of him, three in quick succession with sirens blaring. Kai took the other earbud out, staring at the street where the cars were disappearing with his heart racing hard-too-hard. Maybe there was a serial killer? A car accident? This wasn’t a crowded part of the city, why were they around here?
Answers unfulfilled, Kai put his earbud back in and continued walking.
A few minutes later, his phone rang. Yujin’s name lit up the screen.
“Hello?”
“Kai, remember when you told me to keep an eye out for your friend?”
Kai straightened, heart racing. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, uh, he’s walking out of a convenience store right in front of my station. You have about ten minutes to get here before I’m legally bound to arrest him, ‘cause this is the guy we’ve been chasing for the last week for serial robbery.”
Yeonjun woke up in the middle of an empty parking lot.
The last thing he remembered was the police officer: her telling him to get lost before she has to arrest him, the resignation on her face as she watched him try to get the engine to work before the sirens came any closer. He didn’t remember how he got to the forest, or when he fell asleep: only burned film reel between stepping on the gas and waking up on the concrete. He could guess that some of the pain in his body was from sleeping outdoors on concrete: but the burning in his hands and the way his left arm throbbed were complete mysteries.
Yeonjun pushed himself off the ground and stumbled to his feet, righting himself with a hand on his car. His head swam and his eyes stung: Yeonjun squinted up at the sun, hoping to make himself tear up to at least wash some of the smoke-grit away. It worked, a little, but the tears triggered some inexplicable wave of sadness and he curled in on himself, biting on his tongue to swallow the sob trying to break out.
The sadness didn’t last long, soon drowned out by laughter that spilled out of his stomach and into his throat. When the laughing fit was over, Yeonjun pushed his hair back from his face and turned around. Concrete, concrete, and more concrete met his eye, surrounded by ragged trees and dying grass.
When he turned back, someone was leaning against his car. Someone with familiar faded purple hair. “Soobin?” Yeonjun asked, tilting his head. “When did you get here?”
Soobin shrugged. “I was around.” He gestured behind Yeonjun. “Look, the others are here too.” Yeonjun turned around again: sure enough, there was Taehyun and Beomgyu and Kai. Beomgyu waved, beaming.
Taehyun had a cast on. As Yeonjun watched him, the cast cracked open and a broken bone grew until it jutted out of the cast in two jagged antlers, antlers that grew above his body to cage the other two. Taehyun seemed to not notice at all, still smiling faintly at Yeonjun. When Yeonjun blinked, the antlers were gone and the cast unmarred.
“You’re all dead,” Yeonjun said out loud. He said it with no conviction in his voice, even though it was a fact he thought he knew with his half-rotted heart. A fact as true as the blue-green that haunted him. “You died a long time ago.”
He couldn’t remember how they died. It was all burned film and photographs turned blurry with age. How did they die?
“Well, duh.” Kai shrugged and skipped over, grabbing Beomgyu to drag him along. He jumped up onto the hood of Yeonjun’s car. “You killed us, right?”
Yeonjun flinched. Guilt was molasses in his blood, a thick thing that crawled up his throat to suffocate him. “Kai-ya, that’s mean,” Soobin scolded. “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean we should say it.”
“Hey, hey Yeonjun-hyung,” Beomgyu chimed in. “I have an idea. Want to hear my idea?”
The cat pulled Yeonjun’s head up and down, tugged his lips into a smile. The concrete was swallowing his body, he realized, and soon he wouldn’t be able to move. Something was clawing at Yeonjun from the inside out, and soon he would bleed out from the inside. A shredded corpse inside a stone statue.
“You should join us!” Beomgyu proclaimed triumphantly. “Take the car, and—and drive us all off a cliff!” He laughed, and Yeonjun laughed, and suddenly it seemed like a brilliant idea.
The seconds Yeonjun could remember with more clarity than anything in his life, moments of complete reality dotted among this last episode of insanity. The music Yeonjun couldn’t hear, the one Beomgyu was singing along to and Soobin was laughing at. Joy that curled around his ribcage and swallowed his heart.
The half-second of weightlessness where everything went completely silent.
Patient Name: Choi, Yeonjun
Date of birth: September 13th, 1999
Emergency Contacts: Chun Sohee, Choi Hoseok
Admitted to the ICU at Hybe Hospital on 17/08/2018 for severe bodily trauma after being found in a crashed car. Further investigation revealed brain bleed, severe internal trauma (including skull fracture, complex arm and rib fractures, and complete breaks in both legs and one rib), lower spinal injury, internal hemorrhaging. Patient has been resuscitated twice and is currently in a medically-induced coma for the foreseeable future.
Previous history of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation. This is the patient’s fourth visit to this hospital.
Both emergency contacts have been located.