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Prologue
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Perception was, after all, just a play between the darkness and the light; good and evil, the known and the unknown.
"The apple isn't actually red," he explained, as he jabbed the crisp skin of the fruit that Jimin oh-so wanted to sink his teeth into. Lunch time had long passed and if Jimin wanted any semblance of a meal before the upcoming dance practice, that apple was his last hope. A sigh almost left his lips but he stopped himself in time. "Fine, it's not red. Then what is it?"
The young man laughed; a pleasant but delicate one, as if Jimin's thinly-veiled discomfort was to his own pleasure. "It's whatever your mind wants it to be, really."
"Wait, no," Jimin looked up at the other man, a slight frown on his brows. "The apple is red because that's how the light reflects off it, that's how science works!"
"Yes...," his pause allowed Jimin to seat himself once again (who knew that he had stood up, through this?). "But isn't this whole thing just perception? A play between the darkness and the light?"
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"The shading is so off," Jungkook muttered to himself, as he let the paintbrush drop from his hands. Back in the day, he tried his best to avoid paint marks on the rugs ("it all belongs to Jin-hyung, after all! I can't trash it!") but as time passed, they inadvertently appeared. Was it his carelessness or due passage of time? He had yet to find out but he tried his very best in scrubbing out the stains when the Seokjin wasn't around. The more he scrubbed them, however, the more prominent they became in his eyes - the crimson soon turned into accusing carmine and the jade faded into Persian green - and he was helpless to keep yet another guilty secret.
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It was a nightmare, that's all.
Yoongi sat up on his (rather uncomfortable) bed, fear propelling him upwards. It took him a few minutes to readjust to nocturnal living and he reached for his phone almost three minutes later. 3:13am, an ominous time. He recalled once hearing that the time between three and four in the morning belonged to the undead, the creatures who belonged neither to this world nor to the after. Yoongi had, of course, dismissed it as triviality but Hoseok had been listening eagerly that day, wide-eyed.
"So...what happens after?"
"After what?" Seokjin looked towards Hoseok, in response to the younger man's question.
"What happens between three and four, the time that belongs to the undead?"
Seokjin shrugged. "Don't know, I'd probably sleep through it anyway." Hoseok's disappointed click of his tongue made it harder for Seokjin to contain a chuckle. The younger male muttered something about Seokjin sleeping through apocalypse and Namjoon decided to enter the conversation by quipping that Seokjin woke up far too close to The Hour of The Undead, anyway. Yoongi never managed to keep up with the conversation after that point but he smiled, nonetheless, as he scrolled mindlessly through the app.
Yet, at this very moment, Yoongi's knuckles turned white as he gripped his phone. 'The Hour of the Undead' may as well have been Seokjin's joke - but what else could explain the phantom whistling that woke him up?
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It was always the white ceilings that greeted him, as he woke up; never-changing and about the only consistency he felt comfortable with. Since the last doctor's visit, Hoseok felt transfixed on a particular cement tile on the ceiling. Whenever he felt his grip on reality slipping, his focus was back on that tile. In a strange way, he felt that his life source was inexplicably tied in with that particular tile, whose edges had begun to discolour due to seepage and a faint crack had begun to appear on its left side. The day the tile gave way, so would he.
That is, if he had not done so, already.
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"Have I already done that?" Taehyung mused, out loud. The game of solitaire had been left on the table for days on end, Taehyung only went for it whenever he felt like it. He wasn't home often enough to clean up - ah, if it could even be called a home. Motels could never be homes, anyway, no matter how much you sleep in the bed or how many times your own ghastly face stares back at you, from the bathroom mirror. In a way, Taehyung was thankful of not having to always work odd jobs to make ends meet and scrape enough through for rent. He had lived away from home for so long that he had forgotten what it was like to be dependent on someone else.
Taehyung hates to admit it but he doesn't mind it, for the most part.
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Namjoon sighed, as he let his pen drop on the desk. What was meant to be a brainstorm session for a client's tattoo had ended up being a bunch of scribbles on the paper, accompanied with indecipherable lyrics. He noticed a couple that caught his attention, written ever so faintly that running his fingers over the words showed no indentation, either.
I am stretched on your grave
And I'll lie here forever
My apple tree, my brightness,
It's time we were together
For I smell of the Earth
And I'm worn by the weather.
"Grim," Namjoon whispered to himself, before circling the lyrics. It was a song Seokjin had always found fascinating, the poignant sorrow had always gripped his fancy more than Namjoon's. Yet, at this given time, Namjoon had to admit that the words were more beautiful than he had ever given them credit for.
He just wished that Seokjin were here to hear that, too.