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YK hates dreams. He stands at his bathroom sink, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and trying to scrub the dream from his skin. He washes his face once, again, and doesn't look at himself in the mirror.
He only slept a few hours after working on music into the early morning, and it feels like even less. His dreams are never restful. This time he was lost in fog, following a whistling sound, a timer running out somewhere in the back of his mind. When the fog cleared and the whistling stopped, he was standing in the garden outside the old apartment, a half-burnt piano key at his feet.
How many times has he dreamed of that building, of that damned piano key.
He reached for it, in the dream last night. He reached for it and the dream shifted, and he was hovering in the workroom, semi-present. A version of him was sitting at the piano with JK, playing. Then he was walking home from the beach, with HS, except he could feel the weight of the piano key burning a hole in his pocket. The sequence makes no sense. YK doesn't understand why those things were tied together.
He hates dreams.
He wishes this one hadn't shown him at the piano. It watches him as he pulls a clean shirt out of his bag, as he checks the battery on his laptop and plugs in his phone. He's been sleeping here more often lately, working on his music through the night and crashing on the sofa at the side of the workroom, but he spends very few of his hours here actually sitting at the piano.
His music partner doesn't either. It's not like he ever said anything to her, but for whatever reason she tends to avoid it as much as he does. Working with her is odd and interesting in equal measure. It's hard, but then again music is always hard. She tends to show up whenever it suits her, and nags him as though she's so much older and more experienced, but she is an impressive musician. Her composition and performance, and her critique of his own, are always impressive.
She took his lighter, a few days ago. He doesn't know what to think about that. She took it and wrote his initials on it and gave him a lollipop instead.
They're supposed to meet at the hospital this morning, or so she informed him last night. YK really isn't sure he cares enough to go anywhere, but he does her the courtesy of checking his phone to see if she's called or left a message.
His notifications are off as usual, so it's only because he happens to be looking at his phone that he sees when JM calls him. He stares at the screen for a long moment. He doesn't often answer his phone, and he's not sure why he does so now. "What?"
"Hyung." JM's voice comes through shaky and YK isn't entirely convinced it's because of the mobile connection. A nerve in him somewhere starts blaring an alarm. "Jungkook," JM says, "that night at the beach," and now every nerve is on alert before YK even knows how that sentence ends. "He was in an accident, hyung, he almost died--"
YK doesn't hear any more. Another moment from his dream crystallizes in his mind: a building on fire and his mother's voice--
If I hadn't had you... If you hadn't been born...
--and now he's outside, streets are passing, there are lights and shapes and colours, there are engines buzzing and voices rattling and his head is so full and loud it blends together into empty silence. He is empty and he is running and he can't breathe fast enough.
There are stairs into the hospital and he almost falls on them. A hand grabs his arm and he stumbles as a voice tells him to slow down. His feet do but his heart does not--he can hear it pounding. The hallways are long and dark, filled with people shuffling past, the patients' robes and doctors' coats giving them the shape of ghosts in YK's periphery. They're pale, too, pale and dull, and it feels like wading upstream through a river of the dead. YK's lungs aren't working properly and his breath is too loud in his ears.
There's a door, slightly open, and through the door is a bed, and on the bed is JK. The room is all white and grey and a beeping green heart monitor and a hospital blue blanket tucked around JK's shoulders and YK looks away.
JM's voice echoes in his head, hyung, he almost died, and his back hits the wall of the hallway. He thinks of the fire and his mother's room, his mind hears the building collapsing, and he slides down the wall until he hits the floor. He thinks of the fire and the motel room, his mind hears a piano and JK's voice, and he grips his head in shaking hands.
JK in the burning motel room, JK at the piano, JK in a hospital bed. JK on the cold hard ground, in pain and alone.
It's all because of you, says a voice in his head. It sounds like his mother. If only you didn't exist, says the voice, and it sounds like his own. The words echo against the inside of his skull, louder and sharper, and it's nothing his mind hasn't spat at him before, in dreams or awake, but his lungs are aching as they strain to drag in enough oxygen and his hands won't stop shaking and he's never been strong enough to silence that voice.
I don't believe you, he wants to tell it. He tries to focus on the hard floor beneath him, the cold wall against his back, the sterile smell and plastic sounds around him. It's not true, he wants to say.
But JK is lying there. JK is lying there in a bed across the hall, surrounded by lifeless machines and pale ghost faces, and YK has never been strong enough for any of this.
What if he'd ignored JK at the music shop two months ago, and just left well enough alone? What if he'd died in the fire the way he planned? JK wouldn't have been at the beach that night. He wouldn't have been in harm's way.
YK's lungs stumble as they try to inhale and exhale at the same time and he chokes. JK pulled him from that fire. JK pulled him from the fire, JK made him stay alive, and now JK is lying in that room, his life a beeping green line on a screen. He kept YK alive, and then he almost died. JK isn't the one that's supposed to die. His life isn't worth less than YK's.
If only his lungs were working properly, YK thinks haphazardly, maybe they could cushion his heart like normal. As it is, he's left fighting for air, and his heart is left vulnerable and raw.
He climbs to his feet, leaning on the wall, spots dancing in his vision. The door is open right in front of him, he can see the end of the bed. More sounds join the voice inside his skull, plastic clacking and electricity humming and people shuffling and he can't go in. He can't go in because if he goes in he'll see JK's face, if he goes in there will be questions he can't answer, if he goes in he'll have to look at that raw heart all tied up together with strings and he is not. He is not strong enough to look. He's so much better at hiding, at running away.
So he runs away. Back through the long dark hallways, still like pushing upstream through a river of ghosts, back down the stairs, almost falling again, this time because of something blurring his vision. He stumbles, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. His skin comes away wet.
Tears, he realizes, from some distant place in the back of his mind. He's crying. In that same distant place, it almost makes him laugh. He can't remember the last time he cried.
He goes back to the workroom but he can't stand the sight of the piano, can't stand it watching him, bitterly, reproachfully. His mind hears the chords of the song he showed JK, the one JK was playing that day in the music shop, and then his ears hear it too because he's sitting at the bench, shaking fingers pressed into smooth ivory, almost clinging to the keys as if the music itself is a lifeline, and--
When I hear hyung's piano I want to live.
--something grabs his throat and squeezes and he chokes on something that feels too much like a sob. He smashes his hands flat on the keys and the discordant shout sounds like how the inside of his head feels. Something is burning in his eyes, his throat, his lungs, his heart, and if he still had his lighter the piano might start burning too. He shoves the books from the top of the piano, and the crash of them hitting the floor sounds like bones breaking. He can't do this. He doesn't know what this is.
His breathing is too jagged and too loud. He grabs his headphones and it takes six tries to plug them into his phone. He leaves, because if he stays he doesn't know if he or the piano will remain in one piece. He leaves because he doesn't know how to do anything but run away.
He is outside and it is dark and there is a bottle in his hand. The air is sticky on his face and neck, there are bright coloured lights and dim shapes, there is music blasting straight into his skull, drowning out the world and his own mind. The walls and stalls and people and streetlights solidify only when he bumps into them. It doesn't matter. He thinks there were other bottles before this one, he can't recall how many. It doesn't matter. He can't place the streets around him, can't think what time it is, can't think if there's something he's supposed to be doing, somewhere he's supposed to be. None of it matters. All he knows is he doesn't want to remember, anyway. He wants to forget.
His lungs calmed down after one bottle. His hands stopped shaking after two. He can still hear JM's voice, occasionally, over the music filling his head--
--hyung, Jungkook--
--hyung, he almost died--
--but he takes another drink and it fades. Everything fades.
Somewhere underneath the music and the drink, muddled and blurred, he thinks about that word, hyung. He is hyung, to JK. The hyung should be setting the example, should be doing the protecting, but this is not, none of this, fits. It's not the right way around, it doesn't work. He doesn't work.
He is, he thinks, a bad hyung.