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Chapter Text

THE ROOM CHANHEE WAKES up in is not the one he fell asleep in. He remembers scarcely little else, something throbbing, throbbing, at the back of his brain, but, of that much, he is sure.

The mattress is cool despite his body heat. Floor chilled against his soles despite the sunlight assaulting his eyes. He scans the room: pale damask walls and deep wood beams, a brass-handled dresser topped with a white-china vase. No rug, the floor is stripped bare, and the rest of the furnishings are relatively plain, if in that simplistic, expensive way—fine craftsmanship, a focus on fundamentals and details. Otherwise, the room bears little: an unopened trunk at the foot of the bed, pressed white suits he does not recognise arranged on a clothing rack, a silver-framed mirror beside the swept fireplace, completely untouched by dust.

He catches himself in the glass, trying to make sense of what he sees. Sleep-mussed dark hair. Lavender shadows painting the undersides of his eyes. An overlarge nightshirt hangs open around his throat, revealing the pale expanse of his neck, his chest, and the coal-smudge of a velvet ribbon, stitched above his heart.

When he reaches out to touch it, a phantom pain blooms under his skin and burns.

Blinded, Chanhee staggers backward, gropes for purchase against the vintage dresser. It quakes under the full brunt of his weight, strikes his side in a cacophony. When he opens his eyes again, glassy white shards litter the ground at his feet.

The door bursts open.

“Mr. Kang!” A woman rushes in, picking up her starched skirts. She seizes Chanhee’s arm, her heavy work boots crumbling the ceramic underfoot. “Watch your step, please. Mr. Kim would never forgive me if one of his guests were injured under my care.”

She guides each of his slack footsteps out of the mess, her grip on his forearm almost crushing. Chanhee follows her, slack and numb. Witnesses the horror on her face long before a curved fragment embeds itself into his sole.

Blood scuffs the spotless wood.

“I’m sorry,” Chanhee says lamely, but she shakes her head, panicked.

“No, no, it’s my fault. I am terribly sorry, Mr. Kang.” Distressed tears spring to her eyes. “I’ll go and explain the situation to Mr. Kim immediately.”

“What? No—I can clean up the wound. No one else has to know.”

“Oh! One of the other guests is a doctor. Shall I go and fetch him?”

“Guests?” Chanhee echoes, then: “I really don’t think—”

“Dr. Seokwoo Kim is very respected in his field,” the servant gabbles, and it dawns on Chanhee: this is more for her than for him. If it saves her reporting herself to this Mr. Kim she’s so clearly terrified of…

“Fine. Yeah.” He steadies himself against the wall. Arching his foot hurts, so he lifts it off the ground. The bloody streak widens to a gaping puddle.

She returns in the wake of a slender, well-dressed man, carrying a dark briefcase that clashes with the ivory of his elegant suit. Despite his height and imposing appearance, his eyes are kind.

He glances back at the woman over his shoulder. “That will be all, thank you.”

She blinks, clearly flustered. “But—I haven’t yet escorted Mr. Kang to the kitchens. Or cleaned up the mess…”

The man laughs, a rich sound. Richer than the jewels encrusting his breast and arm, tracing down to his waist. “I can do that. Thank you for your help, Lucy. Really. You’re dismissed.”

A deep flush sweeps across her cheekbones. She drops into a swift curtsey, hands trembling on her skirts. “Thank you, Dr. Kim. Please, feel free to summon me if you need anything.”

With that, she scampers away, the door thudding shut behind her, and the full weight of Seokwoo’s attention falls upon Chanhee, intense and deliberate. “Can you walk?” Nodding, Chanhee hops forward a step, but the moment he lowers his injured foot, pain cuts a stripe up his sole. Seokwoo seizes his hands without a word. “Let me help you to the bed.”

Now that Seokwoo’s fingers are laced with his, it’s hard not to be—aware of him. His presence, filling the room. Gaze taking in Chanhee’s rumpled covers and untouched affects, his pyjamas, his skin bared and on display.

Is it obvious? That this isn’t where Chanhee’s supposed to be?

When they reach the bed, Chanhee crashes onto the mattress, leg angled awkwardly to keep from staining the pristine sheets. “I don’t really need you to…” he begins, trailing off as Seokwoo drops into a crouch in front of him.

At this angle, light warms Seokwoo’s skin, draws gemstones out of his eyes. Chanhee’s mouth dries under the full scrutiny of his handsome face.

“Never mind,” he rasps.

A small smile flicks at the corner of Seokwoo’s mouth. He bends over his doctor’s case, pulling out antiseptic and bandages. “You have one too.”

“I—what?”

Seokwoo gestures to his chest, the champagne-coloured tie looped around his throat. “The ribbon,” he clarifies, “you have one too.”

Chanhee yanks at the lapels of his shirt. “What do you mean, too? Do you also have one?”

Seokwoo’s fingers snag in the fabric of his silken collar, yanking it delicately from the curve of his neck, and there, buried in faded shadow, a black ribbon traces around the base of his throat. Without thinking, Chanhee reaches forward, grazing his fingers against the satin. The skin underneath is warm to the touch.

“What does it—”

“I have no idea,” Seokwoo sighs. “I wish I knew, but… All I know is it means that I trust you. In a place like this… That’s invaluable.”

“I don’t even know what this place is,” Chanhee admits into his lap, creased night-trousers. “When I woke up, I got this feeling, like—”

“Like you don’t belong here?” Seokwoo’s fingers arch around the back of Chanhee’s ankle so he can inspect the wound, and Chanhee flinches at the sudden contact. “Like you don’t remember how you got here? Hold still.”

Chanhee sucks in a breath as Seokwoo presses a soaked cotton ball to the wound, an icy burn seeping into his skin. When the pain subsides, only pleasant relief takes its place, and Seokwoo wraps his foot with deft hands.

“Exactly like that,” Chanhee says. He tests his foot, heel accidentally striking Seokwoo’s lap. “Sorry. Thanks.”

Seokwoo clips his case shut, smiling up at Chanhee warmly. “It’s my job,” he says, pushing to his feet. “Can you try walking now?”

This time, Seokwoo does not wait to engulf Chanhee’s hand in both of his, stabilising him as he takes three, tentative steps across the wooden floor. Pain continues to nip at his skin, but it’s softer now, muffled beneath layers of gauze and the heat from Seokwoo’s palms, soaking through into his blood.

“Yeah. It’s okay now. Doesn’t hurt as much.” Even now that they’re stationary, Seokwoo has made no effort to let go of his hand. “Uh. Lucy—said something about breakfast?”

“Mm. There was a formal bell a couple of hours ago, but you must’ve slept right through it.”

Chanhee rubs at the back of his neck. “Really…”

“It’s okay, though, they always seem to have leftover food in the kitchens.” Seokwoo reaches out, knuckles brushing against Chanhee’s arm. Chanhee shivers, as the thin fabric might as well not be there at all for all he can feel Seokwoo’s skin against his.

“Yeah… Wait. How long have you been here?”

Seokwoo’s gaze grows distant. “Yesterday. Actually, last night, I… Never mind.”

“Seokwoo—”

“Get ready for the day—oh. I didn’t catch your name.”

Chanhee’s mouth slots around the syllables of his name as easily as if he had told it to Seokwoo a hundred, a thousand times before. “Chanhee,” he says. “It’s Chanhee.”

“Well, Chanhee,” Rowoon says his name prettily, accompanied by the melody of soft laughter, “I’ll walk you down in a few minutes.”

Chanhee dresses himself slowly, fingers lost, stumbling, on snowy cloth buttons and draping satin. The open neck of his undershirt scarcely covers the ebony ribbon woven into his skin. An angel wing rests above his heart, pouring silver diamonds that scintillate in the afternoon sun, while ornate brooches adorn his shoulders and lapels.

Instead of socks beneath his trousers, he has stockings, sheer, revealing the thick gauze in stripes around his foot, and steel-toed white boots. He has nothing to take with him, so exits his room empty-handed, padding slowly into an unfamiliar hallway.

A cluster of paintings decorate one wall, expensive oil, boasting vibrant landscapes—snow-tipped mountains and gold-burnt plains, orchards of fruit and fields of flowers, rainbow shades—and all trapped in raw, engraved frames.

Gold name plates hang from each bedroom door. On his own, Kang Chanhee, but perhaps Seokwoo missed it on his way in. Chanhee follows the hallway as it wraps around a dark corner, swallowing light. Unrendered, underpainted black shimmers beneath his soles.

Chanhee spins, panic rising high in his throat. When he lurches into the wall, his hand surges right through, charred wood crumbling between his fingers.

He pulls it back, breathing hard, skin smeared with grey ash. Breathes hard, dust choking his lungs, the acrid aftertaste of smoke; he spins, wide-eyed, and almost trips over a raised floorboard.

No, not a floorboard. Once-vibrant colours muddied with age, the vision of an orchard, wilted and rotting. The stretched canvas ruptured from the inside out, raw, torn edges blackened with soot.

Chanhee lowers himself into a crouch, about to ghost his hand across the painting, when the sound of voices hold him fast.

“He’s—don’t know what—can do—”

“--can’t lose—I—my—”

Talking, in broken, discordant chunks. Crackling viciously like poor radio signal.

Chanhee attempts to chase the sound, takes a half-step forward—and comes face-to-face with a gold nameplate, marked Dr. Kim Seokwoo.

He looks around, frantic, but sunlight spills the grand hallways, the paintings are hung straight in splendour, and even his shaking hands are clean.

He swallows thrice in an attempt to calm himself, before lifting his fist to rap on Seokwoo’s door. Seokwoo answers immediately, tense expression fading the moment they make eye-contact.

He looks no different from earlier, and yet, something feels different about him. Chanhee can’t put his finger on it.

“Let’s go,” Seokwoo says, two fingers to the curve of Chanhee’s elbow, and Chanhee nods, following him back down the corridor.

The orchard painting taunts him as he walks by. Bushels of fruit, seeming to wither and drop in front of his eyes.

Though Seokwoo confirmed that he ate over an hour ago, the table in the day-room remains set for breakfast, lined with a delectable buffet. Pearlescent eggs, grilled tomatoes, rendered bacon in wide strips. Warm, buttered croissants, a selection of salads and soups, and steaming pastries, sugared-tops sizzling into caramel right there on the plate.

Despite the enormous spread, there is only one person sitting there to enjoy it. A young man, maybe around Chanhee’s age, with dark curls bouncing off his ears and neck, and a trellis of diamonds etched into his suit jacket. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows; as he lifts his fork to his mouth, the loops of black ribbon encircling his wrist trail with him, sweeping effortlessly across his forearm.

Seokwoo pats Chanhee’s shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”

“Where are you going?”

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Seokwoo winks. “I’ve been invited to tea in the floating gardens. Maybe when you’re done, you can find me there. Eat well!”

Seokwoo disappears through a door Chanhee didn’t notice when they arrived, likely leading further into the belly of the mansion.

Chanhee takes a seat one down from the other man—a safe amount of space between them—and begins to load his plate with an ample amount of food. Only with so many delightful smells under his nose does his hunger set in, gnawing and insistent.

“I hear the tomatoes are fresh,” the man comments, between enthusiastic chews. “Harvested this morning.”

“Is it… tomato season?”

The man shrugs. “I don’t know that it’s not. I’m Youngkyun.”

Chanhee spears an extra tomato onto his plate in solidarity. “Chanhee.”

An easy smile spreads across Youngkyun’s lips. “Who was that guy you were with?”

“Seokwoo. He’s a doctor.”

“A doctor?” Youngkyun twirls the stem of a glass between his fingers. “You seemed close. I didn’t know this was a matchmaking party.”

“It’s not. We just met today.” Heat crawls up the back of Chanhee’s neck. He stares down into his plate, then Youngkyun’s wrist, poised delicately against the table’s edge. For some reason, Chanhee gets the urge to lower his voice, let it scrape the very bottom of his throat. In the cavernous day-room, high ceilings and muffling carpets, dullness on the margins of the windows, it feels like a necessity. “We have ribbons, too.”

Youngkyun’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline. He looks around, as if confirming that even the nearest staff aren’t within earshot, before ducking across the vacant chair towards Chanhee. “What do they mean? Where’s yours?”

“Over my heart. And, I don’t know.” Chanhee licks his lips. Takes a breath. “Seokwoo said it makes him trust me.”

“Yeah,” Youngkyun says. Something burns in the alluring darkness of his gaze, scorching and intense. “I get that. Can I see it?”

Heat burns Chanhee’s cheeks. “Not here. Later. There’s some stuff I have to know first. Like—when did you get here? What do you remember?”

Youngkyun shrugs, helpless. “I don’t—I woke up in a carriage. Yesterday. Late afternoon, maybe? Anything before that is a complete mystery.” He cocks his head to the side. “Hey. You too?”

Chanhee nods slowly. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Youngkyun takes a serious bite of his croissant, a mixture of chocolate and butter glossing his pink lips. “Me neither. We’ll figure it out. Just… be careful. There’s something off about the other guests.”

Chanhee frowns. “Like what?” And Youngkyun responds by jamming his elbow onto the table, plates and cutlery shuddering, practically inviting everyone in the room to stare at his arm.

“The ribbon,” he says. “Even though it’s so obvious, you’re the only person I’ve spoken to who noticed it.”

After the staff clears away their empty plates and begin to refresh the table for lunch, Youngkyun locks his arm in the crook of Chanhee’s and guides him to the guest sitting-room: a sociable drinking space overlooking a large thatch of yard. Imposing bookshelves line the walls, thick with leatherbound titles Chanhee does not recognise. Gaggles of dull-eyed guests in every free space: around a table, playing cards, on the corners and arms of otherwise occupied sofas.

Outside, a raucous crowd of men and ladies resemble an audience hypnotised, as a man stands in the centre, swirling a glass of wine in-hand as he recounts a story with animated relish, laughter dancing about his sharp eyes, the corner of his mouth.

When the sun appears from beneath an ill-timed cloud, it forms a halo, glazing his blond hair almost to white. Gold drapes off his suit jacket in intricate drapes and webs, tantalising luster.

“That’s the host,” Youngkyun whispers, “Kim Inseong.”

“He’s popular,” Chanhee says. Counts no less than three golden rings hugging the delicate skin beneath Inseong’s helix.

When he reaches the punchline of his joke, everyone laughs. Everyone. But, instead of searching for their approval, surrendering to the formless mass of hands that scythe for his back, his arms, his eye cuts across the yard. He smiles.

And Chanhee’s mouth dries as Inseong frees himself from his captive crowd and makes his way right towards them.

“Youngkyun!” Genuine delight illuminates Inseong’s face as he grasps Youngkyun’s hand in his, initiating a hearty handshake. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“And you, Inseong,” Youngkyun replies. Chanhee cannot read the expression on his face. “Have you met Chanhee?”

The full weight of Inseong’s attention turns to Chanhee, so brilliant it may well be blinding. He slips his hand out of Youngkyun’s and twines it into Chanhee’s with ease, fingers lacing like ribbon-knots. “I’m afraid I haven’t,” he says, with an ardent sense of sadness, as though that fact is devastating to him. “I’m Kim Inseong, the host of this event. It’s truly an honour to have you here, Chanhee. I hope you’re comfortable?”

“Y-Yeah,” Chanhee edges out, startled by Inseong’s piercing gaze, skinning him like an apple. “I slept really well. Thank you.”

At that, Chanhee expects the conversation to lapse, for Inseong to find another guest to attach himself to, draw into his world. Instead, his thumb skims an electric current over the back of Chanhee’s knuckles, setting them alight.

“Have you been working on anything new?” he asks, continuing to move in smooth, repetitive motions.

Youngkyun’s gaze burns into Chanhee’s ear, sensing the lie even as Chanhee tells it. “Yeah.” A navy sky, blurring into gold, reflecting over an open lake; a dark strip of shore. It stops being a lie when he envisions late nights and paint on his hands, lungs filled with heady fumes and turpentine. “I am.”

Inseong’s eyes crease at the corners. “I’ll be proud to see it at its unveiling.”

“Yeah. Definitely.”

Youngkyun whistles, clearly eager to break up the conversation. Maybe as puzzled as Chanhee is, scoring the side of his face. “So, Inseong, when’s lunch?”

Inseong sighs. His hand slides from Chanhee’s, and Chanhee’s fingers curl, already craving Inseong’s touch in its absence. “I have to go and oversee preparations now, actually. I hope you’ll both keep me company.”

Chanhee almost laughs. Inseong just emerged from a cocoon of fawning guests—how can he speak now, as if he’s lonely?

When he’s out of earshot, Youngkyun turns to seize Chanhee by the shoulders, expression tense. Searing. “What was that about? I thought you couldn’t remember anything?”

“I couldn’t. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Until I did.” Chanhee stares at his hands. “I must be some kind of painter. Or, at least, that’s what Inseong thinks I am. I didn’t lie to you.”

Youngkyun drags a hand down his face, sweeping it around his set jaw. “Right… Sorry. It’s a good thing that you remember. So you can blend in.”

The uncertainty lingers in his voice, unerased. Chanhee sighs, curving his hand around Youngkyun’s beribboned wrist.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he says with a sharp tug, and a startled Youngkyun jerks into motion. “I’ll show you you can trust me.”

▬▬▬

A phantom pain throbs once, twice against Chanhee’s heart. He opens his eyes, choking. Choking, as deep-seated heat eviscerates his lungs.

He seizes his chest, metal in his throat. Silk against his skin, in black strips, spilling out through his fingers. A white linen shirt, hanging crumpled off his frame, open around his chest, save for the ribbon, no longer stitched to his skin. Instead, it’s drawn through the button hole, tied in loops over the beat of his heart.

The room he’s in is gutted, ravaged, cinder-smoke clinging to the remnants of walls and rotten beams, extending high to a barren ceiling. What once was a chandelier phases almost through the floor, now a cacophony of bent infrastructure and scattered diamonds, wax candles strewn decapitated across the floor.

Voices claw at the walls, piercing through static in haunting, broken shards.

“—was too—for—body.”

“We—let—this far! W̵̢̧̛̩̿̎̚ͅͅḩ̶̱͚̯̋̇́̿̓͜y̸͔̭̤͎̝͂̍̂̉̾͐͜͜ ̴̠̞͍́̃͑̔̚͠d̵̠͍̺̺͛í̶̟͓̫̬͇̩d̸̝͙͐͛̏͗̈ň̸͎̖͎͙͗̇̆͘'̶̦̓͌̅t̴̡̗͖͚͇̍ ̶̤͗̔̀ͅw̴̛̞̮̅̽e̷̢͉͙̙͕̗͛͝ ̴͈̻͉̘͖̌̐͊s̷͕̲̤̬̀̀̈́͆͜t̷̝̦͙̰̳͔̐̎͌͠ǒ̷̢̻̮͌̈́͒̐̈́͂p̶̝̮̫̘̥̉̋͒͛̏̎ ̶̛̲̖͙̭͈̳̫̃̿͆h̷͈̼̣̥̉̈́̽͊̊̅̚ǐ̶̝̹m̶̖̘̘̱͖͛̌͝?̴̼͖͔͉̩̾̈́”

“He should've turned—After… after what happened,—could've—end—all—chased this path—numb—pain—l̵̩̃ŏ̷͈͙̙ȏ̴͖̜̱̔̿k̵̭̇͘ ̴̦̝̈́w̸̢̳̟̌͝h̷̛̯͚̒̉a̸͎̔́t̷̩͒ ̵̲̑͗̍h̶͉̑ȁ̵̘̾p̵̪̾p̶̰͎̮͋͐ȇ̷̫͘͝ņ̷̼̂̊e̴̩̥̙̊̄̃ḍ̶̓͗͠?̶̡͕̪̋̒͝ I̸̻̼͓͖̬̽̉̐̎́̈́ţ̷̰̝́ ̵̢̥͎̘̟̥̺̈̐̈́͐̒͑͜ç̸͔͌͋͆̿̽̒͒ǫ̶̡̱̙͚̗̦̇̂͊̒̓͐͛̓ͅư̷̜̒̐̾͝ļ̴͎͇̥̂̓̿͆̄͝d̵̼̈́̓͆ṋ̵̢̫͙̹̀̄̿͗̄̀'̵̫͉̜̲̟̞̼̍̍̽̎͂̂̌͂t̷̨̼̀͋̔̆̂̽͗̿ ̵͔͖̥͉͖͉̖̏͛͝ͅh̷̥̝̼͖͓͊͋̌̊͒̄̄̌ä̴̻̝̘͚̯̩̺͕̚v̴̡̠̼͖̟͔̤̑̋ë̷̡̛̞̮͉́͒͒̾͘͝͠ ̸͓̘̘̫̺͔̓̇f̴̩͎̚i̷̧̬̥̳̯̔̊̔̀̊̀̕ͅx̶̓͂̽̈͒́͑͜ė̵̞̳̹̻̎̎̿͒͆͊d̸̢̯̪͉̘̯͋ ̵͔̬̪̺͓͚͛h̶̺͑̈́̆ḭ̴̡͔̪͙̱̝͇̓́͑m̶̦̤̝̠͂̂̊͋̈̓͝ͅ.̶̣̤̃̏͊̉̆̋͊͊.”

They're so close they could be tunnelling into his ears. Chanhee whirls around, raw wood scraping his soles, and is greeted with deathly silence.

No. His breaths. Scuttling murmurs, seeming to cackle ghoulishly at the margins of his consciousness. Chanhee bends to pick up a snapped candle, and it warbles with bright flame in his hand, casting gauzy orange haloes upon the depths of the room. Dilapidated walls. Missing chunks of floor. The door opens into a narrow tunnel of hallway, lined with an array of doors, some ajar and some not.

Chanhee steps out, wood scraping against his bare soles.

“Come back. Come back.”

A piercing heart monitor screech.

Footsteps shudder the ceilings, groaning, distant thunder.

“Ç̸̟̮̩͖͆̃́́͘͜͝ͅH̸̗̠̫̹͉̼̔͘͝ͅA̴̳̗̥̳͖̥̋̒͠N̶̡̛̫̮̥̳͚͉̥̞̐ͅH̸̱͕͖͙̆͊̆̅E̸͉̩̤̪̙̽͋̀̈̋̎͆E̸͔̠̬̖͙͖̞͈̊” His head snaps to the sound of his name. Fingers, icy and tender, reach out of the darkness and settle against his cheek. “W̶̩̟̪̻͌ò̴̱̺̞͇̤̆̄͆̔ņ̶̎'̸͙̀̈t̸̮̺̞͂͂͘ ̷̘̰̈́̈́̾y̴̥͓͎͇̅̊͐͝o̴̰͎̅̓u̷̡̩̟̺̅͜ ̶̢̹̜̳̩͂̊̚c̴̪̜̑͊͛̅ͅȯ̸̫͕͔͉̓̄͜͠m̵̨͂͂͋̓ȇ̴̯̼̫͆͛͝ ̸̼̪̀̌̌w̶̞͕͎͈̔i̴͇̦͓͈̎̊̈͜t̸͖͑̍̀̀̕h̸̠̋̑̽̍͘ ̸̡̹͗̀̍͋̕ḿ̴̢ȩ̶̬̯̫͙̂͛̾͛͝?̵̛̤̄̊”

Closer. Closer.

“What are you—”

The touch rips away as a door crashes open behind him. A man bolts down the hallway, a monochromatic blur as he passes Chanhee. Chanhee can feel the panic pouring off him, the sweat, the scent of fear that permeates the air.

And the gunshot, slicing through the silence.

The man crumples. Knees buckling, jaw smacking against the floor with an audible crack. Convulsing, shaking, as blood spurts from his back and blooms crimson on his shirt, the fatal petals of a flower.

Dead. Dead.

Glassy white eyes caught on Chanhee, the last thing he never saw. Mouth parted, not quite an oh. Maybe help.

And Chanhee stands frozen. As the puddle grows, sticky and dark, memorialised by the firelight in Chanhee’s palm.

As another man strides in, overlarge white shirt and bare feet, dark roots peeking out of his blond hair.

A ribbon clinging onto a few locks for dear life, knotted close to his temple.

He raises his gun, still smoking, and points it directly at the ribbon knotted over Chanhee’s shirt. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” he says, as his finger caresses the trigger.

Chapter Text

EVENING LINGERS IN THE sky in strokes of peach, mauve, and gold, pouring marbled light through the floor-length windows. Inseong’s ballroom is lit by flushed candlelight, drenched in rich fabric and finery. Each table dressed in snowy tablecloths like bright full moons, staff moving between them so seamlessly it is as though they are one with the air. Jewel-like liquids in twinkling glasses, platters of hors d'oeuvres in vivid colours.

Men and women dressed to the nines, dancing with mechanical precision. Chanhee thinks of horses rising and falling on carved carousel beams, each of their steps in haunting synchronisation with the distant ticking of the grandfather clock.

Soft music, a backdrop. Grand double doors opening out into the flower-studded gardens, guests floating in and out with the breeze.

Chanhee fidgets with his sleeves. He knocked on both Seokwoo’s and Youngkyun’s doors, but the staff had informed him that they’d gone down ahead of him, and now, faced with a suffocating amount of people, Chanhee isn’t sure if he could find them if he tried.

“Oh, Chanhee!” Honestly, it’s a relief to hear a familiar voice; Inseong, beckoning him warmly, a gentle curve to his mouth. Tonight, he shines even brighter than yesterday, if that’s even possible, glitter on his eyelids and glitter on his cheeks, like a fairy emerging from stars. He extends his arm. “I’d like for you to meet someone. This is Lee Jaeyoon. You may recognise him from any number of wonderful performances.”

From behind him emerges a man as tall as Inseong himself, with the same, white-gold hair. Suit tailored sharply to his slender frame, an inquisitive politeness to his smile.

And eyes Chanhee remembers as glassy and lifeless, as he bled to his death on the ravaged hallway floor.

Without warning, Jaeyoon wraps his hand around Chanhee’s. “It’s nice to meet you,” he says, and was it nice? Was it nice when he looked to Chanhee for help, the last of his hope dying on his lips, and Chanhee wasn’t able to do a damn thing?

“And this is the artist, Kang Chanhee,” Inseong says. Fleeting hand touching the small of Jaeyoon’s back.

“Nice to meet you too,” Chanhee says. Tongue heavy with an apology that won’t make it past his teeth. What do you say to a ghost walking?

When Jaeyoon’s grasp slips, Chanhee can only think of his hand, twitching, a desperate, silent plea as he shook and shook on the hardwood. Fingers drumming, drumming, until they too, fell still.

Chanhee scarcely notices Inseong’s hand on his shoulder until fingers dig into his arm, gouging impressions into his skin. “Why don’t you take a seat, Chanhee?” Inseong asks gently, searching eyes seeming to know so, so much more than he can let on. “Jaeyoon and I were just about to, as well. The evening entertainment is about to start.”

“Yeah,” Chanhee breathes out, grateful for the easy escape. “Thank you again, for hosting this. And introducing me to Jaeyoon.”

“Of course.” Inseong shakes him, almost affectionate in the gesture. “Oh, I believe that’s Seokwoo waving for you.”

Chanhee glances over his shoulder, and—there it is, true to form, Seokwoo’s arm sticking out from beyond the crowds of people. Even sitting down, he’s statuesque, begging the question, how did Chanhee ever miss him before?

“I’ll go to him, then.” He dips his head hurriedly at Jaeyoon. “It was nice meeting you, Jaeyoon.”

Chanhee meanders his way to Seokwoo almost without thinking, crowds seeming to part around him. Maybe it’s the stress, rising in his throat, or the uncertainty, rolling off him in waves. Either way, when he gets close enough, Seokwoo slings his arm around Chanhee’s shoulders to pull him close.

A stabiliser. Chanhee breathes out, his foot tapping an unsteady rhythm on the polished tile.

“Do you need a drink, or—” Seokwoo’s voice fades into white noise. Chanhee shakes his head.

“Can you just—pour me some water?”

Seokwoo obliges, reaching across the table for water and an empty glass. Chanhee lifts the flute to his lips with a tremoring hand and downs it in one, like something close to drowning.

Seokwoo watches him with concern. “At least tell me if you’re okay. I saw you talking with Inseong. I got worried.”

“Inseong? No, he’s…” Chanhee exhales. “He’s fine. I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”

Seokwoo leans back in his chair. “Are you sure? Don’t get charmed by the way he looks and acts. The way his staff act…”

“Right…” Chanhee recalls Lucy’s distressed face, the fear that had bled into the air. “Lucy did seem to be really afraid of him.”

“No, it’s worse than that. They revere him. Even when you think they’d be gossipping about him, it’s non-stop praise. It’s… eerie. Like they’re so terrified of him, it’s conditioned them into revering him. It’s sick.” Seokwoo scoffs quietly into his glass. “I just don’t trust him. Or this whole event. Any of these people, except you and Youngkyun.”

“Yeah.” Chanhee traces his finger around the rim of his glass. “While we were talking, Inseong introduced me to someone. Lee Jaeyoon. And, I could’ve sworn…”

“What?” When Seokwoo sits upright, his arm presses against Chanhee’s own, a shared cauldron of warmth.

“He was in my dream last night,” Chanhee confesses. Bunches his hands into his sleeves, nails just shy of gouging his palms, and it’s—sharp, that pain. Real. Something to help him breathe. “I watched him die. It was so quick, and I was frozen, and—”

“How did he die?” Seokwoo’s whisper blurs a breath along Chanhee’s cheek, his gaze tracing the contours of Chanhee’s face.

“Shot in the back,” Chanhee says numbly, as Seokwoo untucks each of Chanhee’s fingers from his palm, slips his own into the gaps in-between. “And I was next.”

Seokwoo opens his mouth to reply, but is swiftly interrupted by Inseong striding onto the mezzanine, arms fanned out to gesture to the curtained stage below. Anticipation fizzes in the air.

“Ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed guests,” he announces, in that rich and charming voice, holding Chanhee captive by his own will, “I present to you tonight’s entertainment! Please, enjoy the music, and keep your eyes fixed on the show.”

The discordant note of a violin rips through the air, teethed, before blooming into a beautiful melody. The curtains scroll back, fabric fluttering against the tile, revealing an ensemble of dancers in tight formation, faces tilted toward the crowd.

And, at the forefront—

Chanhee feels his presence as keenly as if the bullet had struck his chest.

Raven-wing hair, stark against his face. Intense dark eyes, like collapsed stars, all-consuming black holes. He rises into his starting position, arm arched and foot pointed, and when he dances, the ribbon in his hair flies with him, effortless, ethereal.

He dances, and it’s breathless, elegant, powerful. Commanding every light, every shadow. When he finishes, sweat glimmers on his forehead, glitters the sharp contours of his cheeks.

Chanhee claps until his hands sting, if only to drown out the hammering of his heart.

When the performance ends, the dancers disperse to clean themselves off and rejoin the party, host Inseong on the mezzanine doing his best to quell the lull.

Chanhee rises from his chair, dazedly picking around the table. Seokwoo reaches for his arm, but only manages to pinch the fabric of Chanhee’s suit sleeve between his fingertips.

“Where are you going? Let me come with you.”

Chanhee shakes his head. Breaks easily out of Seokwoo’s grip. “I need to talk to him.”

“Chanhee, you’re not thinking straight—”

“I wasn’t before, and Jaeyoon died.” Acid swells in Chanhee’s voice. The woman from across the table stares at him with a placid smile, before turning back to the front like a wind-up doll. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“Chanhee—” Seokwoo leaps out of his chair. “This is madness. He’ll kill you too! He pointed his gun at you for a reason.”

Chanhee sets his jaw, and stares up at Seokwoo, resolute. “But he didn’t shoot.”

There was time. A glimpse of a second. The man’s finger on the trigger, hesitating just long enough for Chanhee to wake up.

Maybe it is madness. But Chanhee can still see the life pour from Jaeyoon’s eyes, his blood, seeping out onto the hardwood floor. Can still feel the heat of his skin, the intensity of his handshake.

And besides…

“He has a ribbon, too,” Chanhee murmurs. “If nothing else, I have to know why.”

Finally, Seokwoo nods, a stiff jerk of his head. Piano fingers, stitched into the tablecloth and pulling it taut. “I’ll be waiting here.”

Chanhee laughs softly. “I’ll scream.”

The corner of Seokwoo’s mouth lifts. “Right.”

Lost in spiralling clouds, Chanhee ducks out of the ballroom and into the corridor, ghostly empty. Here, the party grows distant, muted, like a world through water or glass, and it’s easier to hear his own thoughts, his footfalls, staggered and impatient.

Inseong’s mansion is still a maze to him, but it’s easy enough to deduce where a new wave of guests would be staying. The first cohort were given rooms on the second floor, in the east wing of the mansion. Thus, it would only make sense that, when those rooms are full, to redirect guests to the easily-accessible rooms on the first floor.

Chanhee doesn’t have to guess which one the man disappeared into, because the door is ajar as he passes it, offering a glimpse into a room not dissimilar to his own, save for the mess of clothes strewn across the floor.

He knocks twice, then lets himself in.

The man stands in front of the mirror, swiftly buttoning up his jacket. His dark gaze flicks to Chanhee in the mirror, but, even distracted—if it can be called that—his fingers do not miss a step.

As evening sinks into night outside, his lithe figure is stark. A white-paper cutout, buried in glitter and jewels, and champagne-coloured netting twisting up around his slender throat.

He didn't look pleased, when he killed Jaeyoon. Not angry, when he raised his arm in line with Chanhee's heart. No—Chanhee can pinpoint it now when they are not so bare to each other, when the mansion is whole, Jaeyoon is breathing, and Chanhee's own knees don't threaten to give beneath him and quake into the wreckage below.

Fear.

And in that, Chanhee finds the courage locked in his throat. “I saw you in my dream,” he says.

The man fusses with the cuff of his sleeve as he spins on his heel, silence so pointed it may well be scathing, and Chanhee realises too late that this man may well not recognise him at all.

Until he speaks, face crumpling, and Chanhee’s doubt dissipates for anticipation to take its place.

“I don’t think it was a dream.”

Chanhee takes one, cautious step forward. “Why did you shoot him?”

The man’s eyes are piercing, shrunken pupils shaking at their cores. “He attacked… His hands around my—It was him or me.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“It appeared in my hand. Like the only thing I could do was—”

“Kill,” Chanhee finishes, “point the gun at me,” and the man ducks his head, ashamed.

Says quietly, a ghost of breath into the depths of the room, and so far from Chanhee he can scarcely hear it: “Show it to me.”

“What?”

“The reason I hesitated.” A soft, imploring tilt of his head. He readjusts his focus upon Chanhee, gaze a whirlpool of inquisition. Unmasking, disarming. “Your ribbon.”

In dreams, nightmares, oversized shirts and trousers and bare feet, they are unveiled to each other. Vulnerable.

Chanhee eases each button from its loop, exposing his heart to the air. It doesn’t take long: the man’s warmth on Chanhee’s skin, his palm catching Chanhee’s heartbeat. Chanhee, with a fistful of the man’s hair, indistinguishable from the silk.

“There are others,” he murmurs. His wrist pressed to the man’s temple, their pulses interwoven. “Youngkyun and Seokwoo. And you…”

“Taeyang.” His face is so close that when he blinks, his eyelashes flutter against Chanhee’s skin. “The ribbons matter. I know they do. In that dream… it was the ribbon that let me know what’s real.”

“All I know is it means that I trust you.” Seokwoo’s voice, imprinted on Chanhee’s mind. If he keeps following the ribbons, how far will they take him? Where will he go?

And if they unfurl… what lies at the end?

Taeyang’s breath ghosts against his mouth. Sweet sunlight, though the world through the windows is flooded dark. Chanhee parts his lips and tilts his head as two light knocks reverberate through Taeyang’s door.

Taeyang breaks from him, wiping his mouth as he stares dazedly at the door. “Inseong.”

“Here you both are,” Inseong says in lieu of a greeting, a knowing smile perched upon his lips. His gaze sweeps from Chanhee to Taeyang, halts on the scant distance between them with some modicum of—contemplation? Interest? A sharpness edges his demeanour as he gestures back in the way of the party. “Come. Dinner is being served.”

Dinner is a decadent affair, guests engaging in clockwork conversation over a lavish array of dishes: bloody steaks baring pink flesh, lobster shells drenched in buttery sauce. Chargrilled vegetables and rich, fruity compotes, dressed on white plates that gleam beneath the stardust gaze of the chandelier.

Chanhee’s seat is towards the head of the table—a nod from Inseong, no doubt—his name-card poised on the table beside Jaeyoon’s.

“It was him or me.”

Chanhee draws out the empty chair and settles into it, ghosts in his vision. Jaeyoon, long fingers pressing into Taeyang’s windpipe, crushing the breath out of his lungs.

Jaeyoon, the bullet rupturing his spine, shuddering, shuddering, bleeding out into the darkness.

“You’re staring.” Chanhee starts, caught, as Jaeyoon’s eyes slip to his. His mouth curves. “Is there something on my face?”

No crumbs clinging to Jaeyoon’s lips, no splashes of sauce. And no sense of recognition, hidden into the contours of his flawless skin.

Chanhee shakes his head. “Nothing,” he replies.

▬▬▬

The party stretches on throughout the night, embossed with laughter and the piano’s haunting melody curling through the sweet, fresh air. By now, most of the guests have moved outside, a mess of shoes cluttering the doorway as they favour the lake, torched red and gold by the firelight, cool fronds of grass underfoot.

Chanhee stifles a yawn into his palm as he swallows his final canape, swaying on sore soles. Seokwoo is busy among artists admiring his beauty—who were interested in Chanhee too, but he couldn’t keep up half as much as his name apparently implies—and he’s met with and lost Youngkyun at least three times in the past hour. Last time, it was him and Taeyang together, but they’re nowhere to be seen now.

It’s polite form to greet the host before leaving, but, Inseong hasn’t made any extra effort to seek him out since walking in on him with Taeyang, and now, as Chanhee scans the room for him, that search proves fruitless too.

Instead, he ducks back out into the hallway on a one-track mission to retire to his room, the stillness still haunting, alive of its own will. The staff, held up by the night’s event, have left the braziers of the east wing untended, walls drenched black and extended into infinity.

“N̵͖͇̜͙͒͋̍̓͛ͅͅo̵͉̘̯̳̐.̷͕̑̒̈́ ̴̨̺̝̱͚̭̋̑̿Ṋ̸̱̱̳̥̍͗͌͗͆ọ̸̳͈̲͍̤̍̀.̵͕̤͊̀̓͗ N̵̨͎̭̭̭̳͖͒̂̐̓ͅo̶̲̖͌̔̆̐̈́̊̈́̾,̴̳̰̠͉͛̂ ̴̪̹̣̤̗̦̯͐͌͆̈́̓̓̑̕͜n̸̙̰̜͇̿̾͌̈́̽͂̇̒͋o̶̙̙̞͔̓͂̆͝,̵̘̜̐͑͌̀͒̊́͆͘͝,̷̡̧̪̣͉̬̦͍̝͛̋̈́͂́͊ ̶̠̬͑̿̂̽̀̊̍̉ń̶̡͝͝o̴̡̫̯̟͚͍̞̹̠̯̔̀̈́̄̌̕͝͝.̶̧̯̖̯̰̳̘̺̠̱̾͂͒͛̎̐̓͜.,̷̡̧̪̣͉̬̦͍̝͛̋̈́͂́͊ ̶̠̬͑̿̂̽̀̊̍̉ń̶̡͝͝o̴̡̫̯̟͚͍̞̹̠̯̔̀̈́̄̌̕͝͝.̶̧̯̖̯̰̳̘̺̠̱̾͂͒͛̎̐̓͜"

Moaning. A man rocks back and forth with his face buried in his knees.

Blinking. One eye but no face, unshed tears; bronze luster from the candle in Chanhee’s palm.

The plaintive voice of a child. Chanhee’s mouth slots around the words unbidden, as easily as muscle memory.

“Ì̵̼̮͚͙͖̟͊͂n̸͇̙̥̘͚̗̰̈͜͜ś̸̡͔̳̊́̚̕͜e̵̡̨͙̦̯̙̙̒̈͊͐̍̚ǫ̶̨̰̪͖͓̳̖̈̽͌̄̈́̾̄͠n̵̡̬̺͛͊̊̾͋͛̿͋g̸̘̚͘į̵̾͑͒́̑̏̔̏͠ͅȩ̴̣͕͓̭͈̞̬͙̓-̷̙̳͔͚̠̟̝͖̆̍̽̈ḥ̴̢̢̼̭͎̜̟̓̈́̔̐͒͜y̵̱̲͍͎̼̰̦̫̲͗͗̍͒͑͑ư̷̢̡̊̈̋̽̽͘͠ņ̵̗͎̮̺̠̟̦̈́̎̀̈̈́g̸̛͚̻͇̬͇̬̲̰̀̃̀̊̔̓͝͝?̵̰̞̙͕̓͜ͅ”

He trips, managing to catch himself at the top of the first-floor staircase.

Here, the silence is deafening, remnant wisps of smoke hanging suspended in the stagnant air. Chanhee’s pounding blood, his throbbing palms and heartbeat, and the creak of a floorboard, ringing audibly through Jaeyoon’s open door.

Chanhee scrambles onto his knees as Jaeyoon’s jacket is flung into the hallway, landing in a crumpled snow-drift against the wall. He seizes it, perfumed with body heat, clutching it to his chest as Inseong says Jaeyoon’s name.

The two of them kissing feverishly, chest-to-chest and skin-to-skin. Inseong’s head thrown back as Jaeyoon traces down his jaw, the side of his neck, hands fluttering across Jaeyoon’s waist, his broad back. Jaeyoon’s shirt, hooked up to his underarms, so Inseong can trail his finger down the ribbon stitched into Jaeyoon’s spine.

Inseong opens his eyes. Finds Chanhee’s gaze across the room, smile dazed as Jaeyoon seizes his hips and shoves him back into the wall.

Chapter Text

THE WALLS ARE CLOSING in, tight and unnavigable, the tiny light from Chanhee’s candle suddenly strong enough to engulf the room in flame. It shutters against his hand, reacting to the draft that howls through the dark maze like a low-rolling smoke.

The smell of burning is so intense it’s almost vile, suspended in pause and pungent, even through the shirt-sleeve Chanhee tugs taut over the heel of his hand, inhaling dust and cotton with the acrid aftertaste of ash.

This must be the west wing: dropped ceilings and collapsed stairs, a precarious floor that threatens to buckle beneath Chanhee’s every step. Chanhee scuffs forward on scraped soles, bloodied by debris, heart and ears roaring. Tiptoes, as the next stretch of hallway gapes into a wound: torn wooden flesh and bloody plaster ribbons, and Seokwoo on his knees at the fading, dying heart, soles blackened and lips parted, and…

Chanhee, their fingers intertwined, gazing—l̶̙̯͇͐ú̶͎̋̈́͛̓ņ̴͉̹̦̜͑̈́̊g̴͓͚̳̊̉ì̶̟̳̩̜̜͇̍͊ñ̴͔̭͊̓g̸̢̠͓͍͉̀̆̆͗—caressing—c̵̰̬̪̠̰̟̝̀̅͊͛̓͝h̴̨̨̞̤̼̦̊̀͝ͅͅô̶̮̥͊́̕k̶̢͉̯̓̎͝i̴̙͔͎̜͙̪̰̝̓͆̾̐͑n̸͍͇̞̦̙̋́͗͜g̸̤͈̥̥̎̓—moving close—

Chanhee staggers back as the doppelganger opens his jaw around Seokwoo’s throat, but when Chanhee tries to scream, the sound is stolen from his lungs, ice-cold hands at his nape and jaw, turning, wrenching.

Chanhee feels the muscles in his neck strain, gasping, breathless, black pouring into his vision when something slams him into the wall.

Instead of cold, there’s aching warmth, cradling the collapse of his body before he hits the floor.

“Chanhee.” Inseong’s voice, his hands, dragging him onto flailing feet. “We need to go. We need to go now.”

“Seokwoo—” Cracked ceiling and burning eyes and the crooked collar of Inseong’s shirt. Seokwoo with his throat ripped out, bleeding, bleeding, Jaeyoon convulsing as he died then looked at Chanhee as if he didn’t recognise him at all. “Where are we going? You idiot, we need to—”

“Seokwoo will be fine.” Inseong passes his hand back through Chanhee’s hair. When did they start running? When did they leave Seokwoo so far behind? “Trust in him. Believe in him. Seokwoo will be fine.”

“How do you know that?”

“Chanhee…” Curving around his cheek now. Inseong’s calloused palm against his skin. Gaze so wet it may well be oil to a flame, Chanhee’s, extinguished against Inseong’s heartbeat. He doesn’t know where they are now. “Seokwoo will be fine, because he has to be fine. I wouldn’t allow for anything else.”

Inseong half-ducks, half-drags Chanhee with him into the wreckage, the cramped box of an alcove tucked beneath. Hardly enough space for the two of them: Inseong all over him, all around him, knee to knee and forehead to forehead, as something lumbers past them in the darkness.

And the roaring gets louder, rising to a cacophony. Chanhee clutches his ears, but it isn't enough to stop the ringing, used voices like burnt-out matches, striking again—

“Mm… Ag—ain?” Low laughter, on fading signal. Over and over and over. “Come—then, b̶̜͉͇̹̪̏́̌͜ā̶̧̧̯͍̝̣̀̽b̵̬̫̪̤̅̆ý̴̢̝͓̹̑͆͐͠.”

“Shut—‘M tir—ed.”

“—know. A—re you—?”

“Yeah… Thanks, h̷͈̮͇̻͛̈́̇͘̕ÿ̶̪̜͕̬́̉ṳ̶͗̊̓̀̉͝n̸̝͗͌̿͆͋͘g̴̡̛̺̤̜͍̤̖̉.”

—and again—

“Like this?”

“Yeah, you—”

“—anks to—I’m d̸̡͔̟̰̍͑è̶͓ḇ̸̳̒͌ṵ̸̻͆̕͜t̸̫̝̬̮̽-ready.”

“…Are we ready?”

“—worked hard—this, Chani-ya. How could—not—?

—and again—

“Move up.”

“You—’re—sweaty.”

“So are you.” A heartbeat, thundering close like a storm overhead. “—better.”

“Gross. Let me up, h̷͈̮͇̻͛̈́̇͘̕ÿ̶̪̜͕̬́̉ṳ̶͗̊̓̀̉͝n̸̝͗͌̿͆͋͘g̴̡̛̺̤̜͍̤̖̉—to shower.”

“Indulge—just want—to—here a little—longer…”

—and—

A guttural scream tears through the air.

Chanhee bites down on his fingers to keep from reacting as something thuds dully in the distance, followed by the long, dragging sound of footsteps.

Eyes wide with alarm, Inseong’s grip on him becomes crushing. “Through here,” he hisses, his mouth very close to Chanhee’s ear, a maelstrom of hot breath. Blindly, Chanhee fumbles back on his palms, what he thought was solid wall behind him melting into liquid darkness.

The new room is scarcely larger than the alcove, but Chanhee hardly has time to appreciate his newfound personal space as the footsteps come to a deafening halt, and a large, bloodied hand seizes his ankle.

“Help… me…” The man heaves, blood and foamy saliva splashing the ground at Inseong’s feet. Drenching his hair, crimson streaks on his skin, viscera on the corner of his delirious smile. “Please.”

Chanhee has never seen the inside of someone’s body. Glassy ravaged tissue and throbbing muscle cords and torn vestiges of stomach; the man’s hand, buried to his wrist, just trying to keep it inside his body.

And severed shreds of ribbon, shiny and congealed.

Inseong is by his side in an instant, a hand cradling the back of the man’s skull while the other presses over his slashed abdomen, grip so tight blood blooms in webs between his shaking fingers.

“Juho, Juho,” he chants, feverishly, “you need to stay with me, you need to—”

“Huh?” Juho’s eyebrows draw together, slow and dazed. Satisfaction blurring onto fading features. “How d’you know my…”

“That doesn’t matter right now!” Inseong snaps. Head bowed, shoulders shaking, his hand shoving into the gaps of Juho’s in desperate, jerking motions. “Hold my hand. Hold onto me—Juho—” He breaks off, teeth gnashing into a horrible moan.

As the hand around Chanhee’s ankle grows weaker and weaker.

“Inseong,” Chanhee says. “Is he—”

Inseong’s head snaps up at the sound of his voice. “Chanhee,” he croaks, unshed tears glittering in his eyes. “I need you to wake up.”

▬▬▬

After the pre-lunch ride, the main event is high-tea in the sunlit drawing-room, complete with finger-foods, wine samplings, and a free-flowing fountain of champagne bubbling peacefully in the corner.

The only reason Chanhee dragged himself out of bed at all was in search of Inseong, for answers to a dream-sequence that grows more entangled by the day. Instead, he has to peel sweaty jodhpurs from his aching legs and wash off the cloying stench of horse before meeting Youngkyun and Seokwoo in front of the buffet table.

Seokwoo’s already on his second eclair, a bud of fresh cream on the corner of his mouth when Chanhee joins him, handkerchief already poised.

“Take this,” he mutters, but Youngkyun does one better and leans into Chanhee’s palm, wiping his mouth against the soft fabric.

“Thanks,” he says, easing the handkerchief from Chanhee’s grasp with a cheeky grin. “You know, the creepy artist crowd are talking about you again. I heard they want you to discuss your techniques over luncheon, or… something. I dunno.”

Seokwoo snorts. “Creepy artist crowd?”

“Yeah, you know, the…” Youngkyun gestures vaguely to the guests milling around the drawing-room in neatly-organised groups. “They have the—glazed eyes and stiff reactions, like you’re talking to dolls or something. It’s weird.”

“You noticed that?” Chanhee selects some fruit-speckled tart from the table and bites into it, tastebuds immediately greeted by sweet, laced cream.

Youngkyun shrugs, folding and unfolding the handkerchief between his fingers. “Yeah, I guess while you’re apparently some famous painter, all I seem to want to do is socialise and drink and pay attention to who has rings on their fingers.”

“So, a bachelor,” Chanhee surmises, and Seokwoo extends his long arm to display his bare ring finger.

“That makes three of us,” he says, smiling fondly into his glass as Youngkyun seizes Chanhee’s hand.

“I guess we’ll have to make a marriage pact,” Youngkyun jokes, lowering his lips to Chanhee’s knuckles. His breath stirs across Chanhee’s skin as he adds, “Hey, should we dance? This is my song.”

Chanhee squints at the sleeve as the staff replaces one record for another. “Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata?”

Youngkyun laughs. “Come on. If not, I’m swindling Seokwoo.”

“I’m down,” Seokwoo says. “I did promise Taeyang a dance, though.”

“He can join too!” Youngkyun redirects his attention to Chanhee. “Will you or won’t you? We’d hate to make you jealous.”

“I’ll be fine,” Chanhee scoffs, surveying the spread of treats until he lands upon a strawberry cream eclair. “‘M gonna eat this first.”

“Okay… We’ll try not to have too much fun without you,” Youngkyun promises, and, with the hand not wrapped in Youngkyun’s, Seokwoo pats Chanhee twice on the nape before he leaves.

Chanhee chews thoughtfully on his eclair as the event continues to flow around him, then swipes a drink from the table to wash it down with. The last notes of Beethoven peter out, fading into the first, creaking strokes of violin.

He’s halfway through considering whether it’s too early to disappear back up to his room when Inseong finally makes his appearance, late and off-kilter and chased by adoring guests, and instead of indulging them with conversation, appeasing their whims, playing the charming host they all know him to be, he makes a beeline straight for Chanhee.

“You look overwhelmed,” he comments, in lieu of a greeting, and, maybe it’s his dream-brain talking, but, to Chanhee, it sounds like a cry for help. “Do you want to step outside for a bit?”

Even as Inseong asks with perfectly rehearsed politeness, his jaw twitches, a familiar, unseeing filter over his honeyed eyes. Chanhee hurriedly swallows the last of his eclair. “Sure,” he says.

They escape to the floating gardens, a series of secluded plateaus surrounded by lattices and foliage, forming a spiral staircase that overlooks the breadth of Inseong’s estate. It’s a vibrant day, warm, swatches of sunlight glazing rolling hills and stable rooves and the distant ceiling of the southern woods, the firs and fronds of pines and evergreens glistening like wet paint.

Bypassing the ornate outdoor table, Inseong instead goes to slump over the railing, statuesque figure bent almost double as he exhales. Then, he glances over his shoulder to smile tiredly at Chanhee. “Join me,” he says.

Chanhee presses himself forth against the railing. “You needed this,” he says, not a question. Stares out at the tiny figures of toy horses being exercised in their paddock, anything not to acknowledge the fact that instead of gorgeous scenery, the snowglobe world that fits squarely in Inseong’s palm, Inseong is looking at him.

“Believe it or not, even I need a break from my own events,” Inseong admits with a laugh, but, in the corner of Chanhee’s vision, the smile soon fades. “It’s like performing in a play that doesn’t end.”

“You’re good at it,” Chanhee says awkwardly. “I mean… That’s why everyone’s here, isn’t it? Because you’re the host.”

Inseong shrugs. “Those guests are chasing a party, not me. And the ones who aren’t… It’s hard, getting them to stay.” He tips himself against Chanhee’s side. “It’s lonelier than you’d think.”

“Even with the hundred people you brushed off to get here?” Chanhee replies, and Inseong ducks his head, shoulders shaking. Chanhee is just grateful to hear him laugh for real this time.

“Yes. Especially with them.” He shakes his head. “I seem ridiculous, right? Inviting all these people here to fill an unfillable hole, and still complaining that they don’t.”

Chanhee rocks on the heavy heels of his boots. “You do,” he says, finally. “If the hole is unfillable, why bother?”

Finally, the weight of Inseong’s gaze vacates Chanhee’s cheek, refocusing on the faint wisps of fog hanging low in the distance. One of the stablehands has taken a horse for a hack, blitzing across Inseong’s endless paths and fields.

He hums, deep in contemplation. “Because I hate the hole,” he decides, eventually. “I want it to go away.”

“Why?”

Inseong frowns, perplexed, as if Chanhee is asking a question Inseong never expected to hear. “Because I just crawled out,” he murmurs, so soft, a white-knuckled grip around the railing; is he talking to Chanhee, or himself? “I don’t want to go back.”

To the deep darkness of a bottomless pit. The gaping wound of a mansion burnt-out. Inseong cradling Juho’s head on his lap, heaving and sobbing and pleading, begging Chanhee to wake up, and Chanhee did, eyelids flying open in his still-dark room, ice-cold and paralysed, tears still drying on his cheeks.

“Inseong,” Chanhee says, his voice straining, and maybe Inseong knows what he’s going to say, because two fingers touch the inside of Chanhee’s wrist, beneath his sleeve, warmth spreading across his pulse.

“You know,” Inseong says, tone suddenly light, “sometimes I get the feeling that Seokwoo doesn’t like me much. I hope I didn’t do anything to offend him.”

“No, Seokwoo’s just…” Chanhee presses himself further against the railing, knitting his fingers together. “He doesn’t trust you because you don’t have a ribbon.”

Inseong’s eyebrows quirk. “Ribbon?”

“Yeah, like Seokwoo’s neck, or Taeyang’s hair, or Jaeyoon’s back, or…” Chanhee’s hand instinctively clenches over his suit jacket, “my heart.”

Inseong’s hand unfurls toward him, then recoils, freezing in place.

And Taeyang’s fingers are curled invitingly, a wide, alluring smile on his face as he repeats, “Dance with me, Chanhee.”

In a small, square room, a jagged spotlight of daÿ̴͓̱́͗lì̷͈̫̮̣̣̜͌͂̂͛̀͘ͅģ̴̛͍̦̱̐̽̍̉̅͛͝ht̴̨̝̤̳̘͎̻̥̟̅̈́̆ over their heads, Chanhee takes his hand. And they dance, they dance to the voices in Chanhee’s head and the blood in his ears and his heart bursting through his chest.

And Taeyang dips, falls, his waist arching over Chanhee’s arm, as a sword emerges from the cracked wall and plunges into Taeyang’s temple.

His hair scatters first to the stillness, clipped raven wings splattered blood-slick. Blades of flesh, peeled free.

His face immortalised in a perpetual expression of tender contentment, as if dancing with Chanhee was the only thing he ever wanted to do, and maybe it was, once. Chanhee’s mind whirls with it, even as Taeyang’s body becomes dead weight in Chanhee’s arms, even as he lurches to the floor far below.

Chanhee reaches for him, diving blind. Dance with me, he said, and Chanhee took his hand. Dance with me, he said, and Chanhee killed him.

“Dance with me,” Chanhee says, the words choked out of his mouth, and Inseong captures his hand, his other claiming Chanhee’s waist.

In the privacy of the floating gardens, closer than ever before, they dance to no music.

▬▬▬

They return to the high tea just as sunset approaches on the horizon, spilling rosy light through the ornate windows.

Only moments before it evolves into turmoil as the double doors at the front of the room burst open, slamming back against the panelled walls. A man with crimson hair staggers in, dirt and blood scuffed on his jodhpurs, his riding jacket, his gloved hands, quaking viciously. And the body at his side, dragged by one slack arm, head lolling, heeled boots screeching against the tiled floor.

The guests cluster in a ring around him, a panorama of stiff, frozen faces and slack jaws, punched-out breaths and quaking eyes, but when they spot Inseong, they scroll back like waves.

From within the crowd, Seokwoo waves Chanhee over, but—Chanhee can’t leave Inseong’s side right now.

Because, in the middle of the circle, the crimson-haired man drops to his knees with brutal force, all but doubled over the other man’s body. Hands knitted into his hair, his shirt, passing over every inch of flesh and fabric as if to evoke life out of him: the man with wavy dark hair; hard, bloodless features, and an all-too-familiar gash zigzagging across his abdomen.

Scattered shards of stomach, organ tissue shredded dark and deoxygenated. The last ghosts of sunlight illuminating him like a treasure trove of delight—or maybe a funeral pyre, moments from going up in flame.

Juho.

For Jaeyoon, it was a hellish dream. But, this—this is real.

Where the hell is Taeyang?

Inseong lurches forward, hardly seeming to acknowledge Chanhee’s hand lunging for his wrist. Chanhee can hardly believe it either, how tightly he grips onto Inseong, like he might disappear otherwise.

“Youngbin…” he breathes, and the man—Youngbin—stares up at him, horrified and wide-eyed.

“I don’t know what happened,” he says, voice soft and shaky and prone to breakage. “I was just riding—when I saw him, I got here as fast as I can, I—”

“Is he—” Inseong’s voice cracks. Legs shuddering like they can’t support his weight.

“Alive.” Youngbin’s hand ghosts over Juho’s chest, what must be the weak flail of his heartbeat. “Just.”

“Right. Right.” Inseong clenches hard on the quiver of his jaw, fists tight at his sides. “Youngbin, help me get him to a free room. I need two staff watching his bedside at all times. And, Dr. Kim,”

Seokwoo’s head snaps up at being called, rigid and alert. “Yeah,”

“I’ll follow your lead.” Breaking free of Chanhee’s grasp, Inseong drops to his knees, heedless of the blood strobing his suit jacket as he and Youngbin gather Juho’s crumpled body between them. Seokwoo hurries after them, an entourage of staff, the double-doors slamming behind them and blanketing the room with unsettling silence in their wake.

Before Chanhee can think to move, even breathe, an arm snakes around his shoulders.

“Did you see it?” Jaeyoon asks quietly, his hip propped against Chanhee’s side. “His ribbon.”

Glimpses of black amidst ravaged flesh, an ineffective suture over a lethal wound.

The ribbons tell you what’s real.

Chanhee stiffens, thinking back to just that morning, and sensing his distress, Jaeyoon’s palm ghosts over his forearm, thumb over his pulse, to clasp Chanhee’s hand within both of his own.

Chapter Text

THE SUN IS IN the same position as yesterday, the day before. The same light flowing in through Chanhee’s open windows, the same breeze trailing across the tops of his cheeks.

The same stillness in front of his eyes, and the same cacophony that takes its place, raucous and insistent and undeniable.

“—H̶͓̃ẽ̵̜̠̥̦̒l̶̛̬̫͎̎̋ͅL̵̦̆̈O̶͎̅̅̎,̷̯͐͆̇̓ ̵͇̟̌̓̀w̶͇͋͗͒͜E̸͎͍͑̌͑ ̸̙̙̣̗̍͑a̶̻͕̪͑̈́͝R̵̖̾ë̷̺́—”

“H̷̬́ǐ̶̹̬͝S̴͙̜͓͋̀́̆̾ ̴͓̪̙̳͈́͂̽̌h̶͈͈̮̬͠E̶̯̾̑́͘A̶̡̖̋͑̃͐͝r̸͇̜̲͕̊͌͜Ţ̵̲̭̤͓͂̏—”

“h̴͇̭̟̎̊e̷̦̳͕̞̞͌̓’̸̹̤̒̊S̸̢̗̬̳̬̅͛̇̓ ̸̥͒d̴̹̥͙̙̊—̸̡̥͈̹̇̌̈̓Ầ̷͚R̶̦̠̺̙̀̐͌e̵̼̭̭̍̿̿͂ ̵̨̿͑͠ỳ̵̳͍͕̩͜o̷̟̜̿͑̍̅ͅU̴͇̎̏̒—̶̡̻̯͖̀̓̋͘r̷͚̲̗̥̽̆̐͛̈́ͅí̴̼̠͐͊ͅN̵̢͐̋g̸̢̟̣̮͙͂̍̄ ̷̧͖̎͐̊̍͂͜M̶͈̜̹͇̟͊͌̆̂̕é̵̖̠̌́?̶̤̇͑͘ ̶̩͓͎̉͐̊̾̽H̶̨̯͎̐̇É̷̗̫̮́͛’̵̘̄̀S̴̨͓̻̩̔̊́̚—̸̧̨̢̛̥̯͑̿̽ȧ̸͈ͅŅ̴̞͛̾̃Ḏ̵̛̲̈̄̈̚ ̴͎͑h̷̜͋͜e̵̛̬̼̽͋̕̚’̸̡̘̪͕̳̿̀́̓S̷͎̯̊͋͜͠—̶̣͗͋͋ñ̶͖̗̜͍̌͛o̵̤͙̼̝̳͂̀̽Ṯ̸͉̮̪̔—̵̯̈́̓͂́́i̵͇̟͉̠̓͊̊̾Ṇ̴̛̼͎͔̌͜G̵̙̺͖̃̋͂̏͂ ̷̠̗̩̫̍ͅB̴̹͋̌̌͂A̷̙̱͇̠̓͂̕c̵̨̦̆̒̌Ḱ̵̝͛̓!̵͎̰͍̑͆̏͆͝”

The same creak of his bedroom door as Seokwoo pads in on bare feet and shuts it gently behind him, so early that even the staff have not stirred. Since Chanhee stopped sleeping, Seokwoo has been wordless, consistent, lingering beside him far into the small hours, and falling just short of spending the night.

“Again?” Seokwoo murmurs, though he already knows the answer, folding up his long legs to take a seat beside Chanhee on the sunlit floor. His arm pressed up against Chanhee’s, their backs to the made bed, smooth and untouched.

Chanhee shrugs. “How did you sleep?”

Seokwoo touches two fingers to the full curve of his throat, the ribbon stark and brazen in the morning light. Swallows, his whole hand shifting with the motion, before he pulls it away. It falls just shy of Chanhee’s, and he makes no move to close that distance.

“You need to sleep,” Seokwoo says softly, a glimpse of the doctor in him, but then he shakes his head, his face tilting to Chanhee’s. “How can I convince you? Chanhee…”

Stubborn, Chanhee averts his gaze and sets his jaw, watching the clouds move into position, the first step of a marked formation. “Tell me Juho will make a full recovery,” he says. Fidgets, crossing his hands one over the other. “Tell me why I’ve seen Jaeyoon shot and Taeyang stabbed and Juho dying, but I’m just fine.”

Seokwoo exhales a long sigh, his back sinking back against the mattress. His head lolling, before eventually dropping against the side of Chanhee’s, soft, dark hair tickling his ear. “Does it work?” he asks, the volume of his voice succumbing to the earliness, to the sunrise seeping across the sky.

“—aYB̶̺͐͌e W̵̞̠̑e̸̟̝͋̀ aL̷̲̈̍L ̷̧͗ś̴̻͇H̴̰͌Ou̵͎̇L̸̢̫͛d H̷̛̳͐ą̸̜̚v̸̫͗E̴̗̅—W̶̳͒̔i̵̢̞͆͊TH̸͇̀̂ ̶̛̱̋hiM̷̙̎.”

“̴͚̓̃—̸̰́ó̴̻̒Ń̷̦͍̈́’̷̼͍͋̚Ṱ̴͝ ̸̟͖͘ý̴̼̝ȏ̸̯̠Ú̴͉—̶̦͐̚ď̶̘̒è̸̻R̴̳͗ŝ̶̝Ț̴̈́͝A̴͈̹̐ń̵̖D̴̡̡̂̒?̸͍͂—̶͙̄’̷̤̋F̶̨̗̑̚ ̵͇̙̚͘h̵̨̼̉e̵̜͇͋̔’̵̼̿̓ͅS̴̩͠ ̵̠͆N̷̦̂̅O̸͈̓̈́t̶͎̓—̴̳̤̐t̶̀ͅĤ̶̬͌E̷̟̿͂n̶̙̊ ̶͙̺̏̚I̵̧̙̐̐’̶͖̬͝d̸̪̍ ̷̮̪̔j̸͈̯̏̚U̶̻̻͑s̴̮͔̄T̶̥̘̐́—̵͕̈́a̵͚̍͂D̴̬̓̚L̶͖̀̌y̸̨̘͘ ̵̛͉̓G̵̪̭͆ọ̸͕̔̕—̵̹͚͛̍h̷̗̺̋̈́i̴̘̇ͅM̸͎̖̕!̸͘ͅ”̵͕̆

“Sometimes, I just want to die.”

The words slip from Chanhee’s tongue, unbidden, and Seokwoo seizes his face in calloused palms. “Chanhee—”

Chanhee shakes his head, cutting Seokwoo off, even as long fingers skate his cheeks, the slant of his jaw. “That wasn’t…”

Seokwoo grits his teeth. “Right. Dammit. You need sleep, Chanhee. If you can’t tell the difference—”

He can. He can. It’s everyone else that can’t. They sleep, and they dream, all the while reality gets stirred beyond recognition.

“I don’t need sleep,” Chanhee snaps. “I need—”

To wash his face, strip it off the lavender shadows clinging to his eyes. Drink so much coffee it purges the ghosts from his system. To do something about the haunted look that plagues his features, lidding his eyes and curving his mouth; the one he must be wearing right now, reflected in the glass, for Seokwoo to look at him with such gentle pity.

The day is bright, but not bright enough. If anything, the sunlight deepens the darkness, beckoning his subconscious; droves of white—b̶͈͑̐͂̾l̶̬͉͕͌a̸̢̛̻̦̩͔͕͕̅̂͛̊̾͝c̶͚̥͙̓ͅk̴͔̙͓͇̜̦̓͗́̉—noise, of static vision, of a pain Chanhee doesn’t have words for, ripping out of his chest.

He grips his shirt, gritting his teeth, and Seokwoo’s hand hovers over his.

“Chanhee,” he says, low voice a comforting salve over the frayed edges of Chanhee’s mind.

Chanhee shakes his head. “Need to—get out of here.” It’s not enough. Nowhere is safe. He drags a hand down his face, forces himself upright. Seokwoo seizes his shoulders, and Chanhee sways a little in his grasp. “Let’s go.”

Youngkyun and Jaeyoon are already waiting for them at the day-table, picking languidly at the morning spread with no hurry, no urgency. The days unwind in front of them in endless sequence after all.

Chanhee feels stagnant, waiting for the end.

“Not sleeping has made you more punctual,” Jaeyoon comments, eyebrows raised. As always, he’s portrait-ready: eyes bright, fair skin even and smooth, lips faintly glossy. A perfect mask for the darkness dwelling underneath, in all of them. “Maybe there’s some sense in it.”

Chanhee scoffs. Do they even sleep? Or are they always dreaming?

Youngkyun shakes his head, “You’re still not sleeping?” then yelps, as Chanhee swipes his industrial-sized coffee mug. “Hey, that’s mine.”

Chanhee takes a long, deep drink. As soon as the caffeine enters his system, it unfurls some of the tightness in his muscles, switches his brain from laggy to alert and skips all the steps in between.

He down the half-empty mug with so much force that liquid sloshes over the side, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. From beside him, Seokwoo dabs at the table with a handkerchief. “Wasn’t good,” he says.

“Did you have to drink half of it to tell me that?” Youngkyun retorts, defensively reclaiming his drink. “Everyone’s right. You really do need sleep.”

Chanhee rolls his eyes. “I came for breakfast, not an intervention.”

Jaeyoon cuts into what looks like a crispy chicken pancake. “You’re obsessed,” he says, not unkindly, and, at a push, Chanhee prefers hearing it from him than whatever imploring speech Seokwoo is probably cooking in his brain. “You’re going to fall asleep eventually. What are you trying to achieve?”

“Whatever you’re not achieving.” Chanhee glowers into the table, half a croissant Youngkyun has slowly been stealing from his plate. With a scoff, Chanhee dumps the other half into his coffee mug. “It’s better than lying down and waiting. I saw you die.”

“It wasn’t me, though,” Jaeyoon says slowly, thinly-veiled emotion in his tone.

Chanhee scoffs. “Doesn’t mean you’re invincible.”

Jaeyoon sets his fork down, still gripping onto the last of his peace with an intensity Chanhee hasn’t seen from him. “Chanhee—”

“Tell me you slept well,” Chanhee challenges.

“I didn’t,” Jaeyoon says. “But, I’m also not going crazy.”

Chanhee twitches.

“Guys,” Youngkyun says, and Seokwoo reaches around Chanhee to shove his arm between him and Jaeyoon.

“Enough,” Seokwoo says sharply, the austerity of his gaze sweeping to Chanhee in an instant. “If you’re not going to sleep, then you need to eat. Your emotions are all over the place.”

It wasn’t going to be a fight. Not with Jaeyoon. But his gaze is pointed down, his lips pursed tight, and every motion he makes to resume eating is poised and deliberate, down to the very way he chews.

Then, “Sorry, Chanhee.” He reaches across the table to pat the back of Chanhee’s hand, and Chanhee swallows.

“Sorry,” he replies.

Meanwhile, Youngkyun pushes his mug down the table, the wet, shrivelled croissant-half bobbing unappetisingly in the remnants of his coffee. A grin coils around his lips. “You can start with this,” he suggests.

Irritated, Chanhee makes a show of gathering a selection of pastries into a square of cloth and tying them into a bundle.

Seokwoo curves his hand over Chanhee’s wrist, but Chanhee quickly shakes him off. “Where are you going,” he asks worriedly, no inflection. “If you’re going for a ride—”

“I’m going to see Juho,” Chanhee snaps, then bites the inside of his cheek. “I need to talk to him.”

“I doubt he’s up to…” Seokwoo begins, then sighs. “Talking. But you’re going to go anyway, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’m not doing any good here,” Chanhee mutters, and Jaeyoon laughs a little over the lip of his teacup.

As instructed, there are staff posted either side of Juho’s door, a leatherbound book of notes, observations, and medications occupying a narrow side-table beneath the window. With startling synchronicity, both heads turn as Chanhee approaches, bearing matching inquisitive gazes and flattened lips.

Chanhee realises too late that one of them is Lucy, who, after the same delay, immediately breaks character.

“Mr. Kang,” she says, followed by a swift, clumsy curtsy. “I noticed you were no longer allowing staff access to your room. Is there something I can do for you?”

Chanhee gestures to the door. “Here to see Juho.”

“Oh.” Her face creases in genuine concern. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what either Mr. Kim or Dr. Kim have advised regarding visiting Mr. Baek.”

“They’d understand,” Chanhee says, which is only three-quarters of a lie. Seokwoo certainly hadn’t had any lasting intentions to stop him. “If he’s sleeping, I’ll leave.”

She exhales, and dips her head. “Yes, of course, Mr. Kang. Go through. I would ask that you don’t distress him at all.”

Chanhee nods, and, bypassing the other member of staff, slips into Juho’s room.

Despite being yet another guest room, just like anyone else’s, the open windows and clinical white sheets transform it into an infirmary. Little surrounds Juho in the way of personal artifacts, as to be expected: instead, his dressing-table and nightstands are cluttered with rolls of linen, various medications, and a pitcher-set of water, complete with a jug, large bowl, and two drinking glasses.

Juho lies in the centre of the bed, spread starfish-style beneath a mess of covers, exposing haphazard glimpses of flushed skin. The moisture from his flannel plasters his dark hair to his forehead and drools tributaries down the sides of his face, and he breathes in dilapidated rhythm, occasionally broken by a dull, eerie moan out of parted lips.

Someone, likely Seokwoo, has sewn his stomach shut, in neat, near-invisible stitches, incorporating the ribbon in a jagged, imperfect weave.

Chanhee’s boots are too loud, so he unbuckles them, padding up to Juho’s bedside on stocking feet.

Up close, Juho resembles more of the ghost Chanhee is so afraid of, stern and pale, throat gargling around unintelligible sounds, his half-lidded stare glazed with delirium.

Until his eyes snap open, searching and clear, and settle on Chanhee with frightening focus.

Startled, Chanhee picks up his hand, encumbered by its sack of pastries, to wave slowly. “Hi, Juho.”

Juho stares at him, voice heavy-weighed. “Ch̴͔̩̞̋͂̍an̷̹̈́͝i̵̙̠͖̊.”

Did he say that? Chanhee drops the pastries on the bedside table, croissant crumbs exploding into his palm.

“What happened to you?” Screaming. The bludgeoned skin of his stomach. What face did they wear?

Juho’s lips flatten, uncannily sombre. “He’d want us to work hard for him. You know that, right?”

Him? Chanhee shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”

But Juho continues almost without acknowledgement, reaching jarring, bullet-time speed. “Have you heard them talking? It’s not true. Any of it. They can say what they want, but—”

“—Juho—” Chanhee starts, but cuts himself off as tears spring to Juho’s eyes.

“—we didn’t die with him, Chani. Listen to me.” With ferocious intensity, Juho’s hands scythe out of the covers. Chanhee stands stone-still as he wrenches Chanhee’s wrist in his palm, dark red marks blooming upon his skin. His other hand, quivering, presses resolutely into the space over Chanhee’s heart. He urges forward into Chanhee’s space, his hot breath curling against the side of Chanhee’s face. “No matter what happened, what happens now, we’re still alive.”

Then, he releases Chanhee with such force he’s thrown back into the dresser, impact knocking the oxygen from his lungs. No, there was none of that there to begin with.

Summoned by the sudden commotion, Lucy bolts into the room, dark eyes blown wide. “Mr. Kang—”

“I’ll go,” Chanhee interrupts, still winded. “Uh. Take care of him.”

Her lips purse, but she nods, perhaps just as confused as he is.

Listlessly, Chanhee backs out of the room, and flinches when a pair of arms close around his back.

“Taeyang,” Chanhee blurts. They’ve scarcely seen each other since Chanhee’s dream. He put on another performance the next evening, and he looked—fine, spectacular even, but it wasn’t—the same as feeling him, his heartbeat, pressed up against Chanhee’s shoulder blades and back.

A faint smile crosses Taeyang’s lips as Chanhee searches his temple for a wound that isn’t there.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, nudging away Chanhee’s hand to catch it within his own.

“I needed to see Juho,” Chanhee says, and Taeyang’s eyebrows furrow.

“Youngkyun told me you haven’t been sleeping,” he says, with not so much concern for Chanhee’s mental state as something else. “I doubt you’re thinking straight. So, why are you invested in this?”

Chanhee closes his eyes. If he focuses, he can still see the dream as it was, a perfect model. A crime-scene preserved in a snow-globe. “I was there,” he says. “With Inseong. We didn’t see it, but—Juho asked for our help.”

Taeyang’s dark eyes do a critical sweep down Chanhee’s face, before he concludes, “So, you feel responsible?”

“For something,” Chanhee counters. His throat dries, no matter how much he swallows. “For you.”

Taeyang manipulates their joined hands, curving them around the back of Chanhee’s skull, equal parts scolding and affectionate. “What happened to me?”

The sword emerging from the wall. Taeyang asking him to dance. Shreds of his hair in a heap on the floor, baring the wound, but…

“No ribbon,” Chanhee says. “You were stabbed in the skull, but—”

“—it wasn’t me,” Taeyang finishes. “Jaeyoon wasn’t Jaeyoon, and that wasn’t me.”

“The ribbons tell you what’s real,” Chanhee murmurs. In his periphery, Taeyang grins approvingly, maybe a little at Chanhee’s expense, his thumb catching under Chanhee’s chin, but—

Taeyang’s bullet in Jaeyoon’s back. The sword in his skull. The rupturing of Juho’s stomach.

Chanhee shakes his head. “It’s a threat,” he says, and Taeyang’s eyelids flutter just slightly, the only sign of shock that enters his expression. “We’re being hunted.”

Taeyang’s thumb thoughtfully runs over Chanhee’s lip, though his gaze is pinned somewhere over his head: Juho’s door, the infirmary that lays beyond. “Yeah,” he agrees, hushed. “And Juho already lost.”

▬▬▬

Today, lunch is a smaller and more intimate affair, spread between the drawing room and outside, guests free to filter and muddle in-between. Drinks free-flowing, though Chanhee has opted for tea, and appetiser-sized portions to make room for an entire buffet of expensive desserts.

Today, the entertainment is Jaeyoon, singing a duet with Inseong. He drifts up to the stage with smooth, flawless confidence, the two of them a statuesque pair.

The next thing Chanhee remembers is Jaeyoon gently patting his nape as he returns to the seat at the table, but nothing in between.

Great. So, now he’s blacking out.

Chanhee sits himself upright and rubs his eyes, hoping to be more alert for the next performance—some kind of poetry reading?—but nothing escapes Seokwoo’s notice.

“You’re going to collapse,” he says, for what feels like the umpteenth time, and, honestly, it’s getting grating.

Chanhee slaps his cheeks so hard they sting. “So let me,” he snaps, and Seokwoo sighs.

“Chanhee—” he starts, a long-suffering irritation in his tone, but he cuts himself off as a shadow descends upon their small table, darkening what remains of Chanhee’s too-milky tea. “Oh. Inseong.”

It isn’t long before Inseong’s hand dawdles on Chanhee’s back, and it takes all of Chanhee’s focus not to shake it off, or, worse, fall asleep against it.

“Do you mind if I steal Chanhee?” Inseong asks, warmth honeying his tone.

Chanhee rubs fiercely at his eyes again. “Why don’t you try asking me?”

Inseong laughs, and, in a surprising motion, squats down to make eye-contact with Chanhee, hand upturned and extended. “I need a break,” he says quietly, and even if he’s lying, it’s a relief not to hear that it’s for Chanhee’s benefit. “Indulge me. Please?”

“Chanhee…” Seokwoo says lowly. His hand cups Chanhee’s shoulder, but quickly retreats as Chanhee shakes him off.

“He’s asking me to indulge him, not operate heavy machinery,” Chanhee mumbles. “‘S’fine. M’fine.”

With that, he drains the last of his tea and follows Inseong out of the stifling drawing-room.

They walk in silence, which is unfortunate for Chanhee, who finds it lulling, suffocating. He trails a few steps behind Inseong, watching his feet so he doesn’t do something stupid like trip, up countless hallways and flights of stairs, until the familiar sights of the guest wing fades away. The wood panels beneath his feet become glossy marble, the wallpaper a metallic damask. The air lightly perfumed: lavender, then something deep and exotic.

“Is this…”

“My suite,” Inseong says, and, finally, his hand fits into the crook of Chanhee’s elbow, making up for hundreds of steps they took without touching at all. “Sit,” he says.

There are so many options. Luxuriously upholstered lounges, the thick, silken rug, a pink velvet armchair beside the fireplace. But, Inseong throws off his jacket and urges him towards the bed, plush, embroidered sheets sinking beneath Chanhee’s weight, and Chanhee reaches up to cup his face, the contours of his cheeks. His breath, misting against the curve of Chanhee’s palm.

Impatient, Chanhee draws him closer, his knees against the bed, hips between Chanhee’s parted thighs, and when Chanhee dives forth to kiss him, Inseong’s eyes blow wide.

“I don’t think—” he starts, and Chanhee shoves his hand between their mouths, rejected.

“Right,” he mutters. “Because of Jaeyoon, right?”

“No,” Inseong says, a ticklish current of breath against Chanhee’s palm. He pushes forward, backing Chanhee’s knuckles against his mouth. “But you’re always with Seokwoo.”

“I didn’t kiss him,” Chanhee retorts, and Inseong laughs, incredulous.

“But you spend all your time with him. He’s been sneaking in and out of your room for days.”

“But he's never spent the night,” Chanhee counters, and Inseong kisses his palm. His knee barging between Chanhee’s legs, fingers closing around Chanhee’s wrist to tug his hand free.

Chanhee lands on his elbows, back arched off the bed as Inseong climbs over him, expression unreadable.

“Lie down,” he murmurs, kissing Chanhee between words, working at his jacket, his shirt, freeing it from the waistband of his trousers.

“I don’t want—” Chanhee begins, as Inseong bares his skin, traces soothing patterns across his waist, hips, the plane of his stomach.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Inseong says, mouth trailing upward, his breath a flurry at the corner of Chanhee’s mouth. His face rendered so close that Chanhee can feel faint stubble on his jaw, the intoxicating flutter of his eyelashes. “Just lie down, and nothing else. Nothing else, I promise you,” he whispers, rubbing comfortingly up and down Chanhee’s rib-cage.

So, Chanhee falls, shivering. Lush sheets and full pillows and desperate, alluring warmth; his exhausted body craves what his mind rejects.

“Inseong…” Chanhee’s voice wavers, so Inseong kisses him again, hands splayed across his ribs, thumbs sweeping over the top of his chest. So sweet, so lulling, that Chanhee struggles to think. “I don’t—I—”

Inseong hushes him. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he says, with such tenderness in his gaze that Chanhee aches to believe him. Every part of him a lullaby, and Chanhee… is… falling. “Sleep, baby.”

“No, no,” Chanhee moans. Shakes his head, panic spiking his blood, before he does something terrible, like listens. “I can’t, I can’t—can’t dream, I—”

Jaeyoon. Taeyang. Juho. The icy touch on his face. Screaming.

“You won’t,” Inseong whispers. “Nothing will happen. I’ll be right here.”

“Inseong—” Chanhee’s breath hitches, conflicted, as Inseong shutters a hand over his stricken eyes. He lies down beside Chanhee, his nose pressing into the hollow of Chanhee’s cheek.

“I’ll be right here,” Inseong repeats. Chanhee’s world dark beneath his hand, like Chanhee could succumb to him, leave him in charge, and never see anything Inseong doesn’t want him to see. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Shall I sing?”

“Can you?” Chanhee mumbles, and when Inseong laughs, it sounds almost sad.

“For you,” Inseong says, and if Chanhee was already teetering on the edges of sleep, then the way Inseong sings, angelic and beautiful, gently carries him over.

▬▬▬

Despite the overcast day, Chanhee’s blood runs fast and hot with his morning coffee. He takes a sip of it with one hand while his training bag dangles from the other, clashing against his hip as he climbs into the passenger seat.

“Hey, watch out,” Y̴̧̺̭̬̓̚o̸͉͇̤͋͆û̷̘̺̦̩n̶͓̈́̑̅g̸̠̃̊b̴͔̺̙̓̏̌̍ì̵̩̟n̸̟̻̜̈͆̊ͅ warns, then meets Chanhee’s gaze in the rearview mirror with a grin, eyes twinkling. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Chanhee replies, kicking his bag to the floor and resting his feet on top. After putting on his seatbelt, he leans back in the seat, cradling his coffee cup between two hands. “Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

▬▬▬

Clasping Z̷̨̞̭̳̗̞̀͆͑u̴̇͛̈́͌̾̏͝h̵̨̺͚̰͔̦͐̏o̴̗͓͗̿̀͌̉’s hand, Chanhee lets himself be dragged up off the shiny wooden floor, sweat pouring off his forehead, clinging to his stomach and the undersides of his arms. The room’s mirrors steamed with the evidence of hours of hard work, blurring each of their reflections.

His body worn and aching, the satisfying burn of being pushed to his limit.

Sweeping back his drenched bangs, Chanhee uses his other hand to trace his name in the glass, next to the smiley-face D̴̨̡̡͙̼͚̺͕̝̈̈́͝ả̶̧̀̉͒̃̂̌̕̕͝w̶̲̌̅͘̚͘͝͠͠o̶̝͕̥̅͊̒̇́́n̸̡̻̤̣͑ drew earlier. Their memories from yesterday, from just a few hours ago, are already misting over.

“You did well today, C̷h̶a̶n̸i̴-ya,” J̴̞͍̱̠̟̟̱͌͆̓̐͆ǎ̶͓̿̽̇̄̐̾̕e̸͒́̐́́͌̾̓ÿ̴̡̟́̈́̇͗̇͝͝o̴͕̙̐̍͋́o̵̫͒͐̀̅̑n̵̨̲̣͕̔ says, Chanhee grimacing as his heavy arm settles around Chanhee’s shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go wash up.”

▬▬▬

Chanhee swirls ramyeon onto his chopsticks in a single, practised motion as H̷̲̞̮̆w̷̲̄̆i̸̙̤͘ỳ̸̼̰̎͝o̵̖͓̣̕u̷̪̺̾̚n̶͓͂̔g̵̩̈ recounts his day, T̶̘̀̄̅a̷͖̳̩͝ẹ̸̹̠͒̃y̵̡͚̺͍͗a̶̮̱̿n̵̙̘͔̩̄͐̎g̷̹̹̜̍ intercepting with witty commentary, and Chanhee—laughs, and it feels good to do so, relieving, weightless. And it’s good pretending, e̶̟̗̻͒͘i̵̜̬̗͗͋g̸̨̧͍̋͗h̶̰̏t̸͍̘̊͌́ of them crowded across two tables, thinking about how the restaurant staff are grateful for a convenient number of people, how they have equal teams for paired games and competitions.

How there’s no good, coming out of the bad, but there are things that make it a little smaller, a little more bearable.

Across the table, R̷̳̐͝o̷͈̼̙̠͑́̍͜w̸̜͕̼̘̎̀̈̂͝͠o̴̠̯̳͐͐̈́̀́͗ͅò̶̧̱̚n̶̢͈͚̘̈͌̔̀̐ reaches for his hand, and Chanhee doesn’t resist.

They’re not okay, but maybe there is a path forward, and it’s the first time it’s felt like that.

▬▬▬

Chanhee knows it’s too early before he opens his eyes. A morning so dark it may as well be night hangs behind the drawn curtains, blanketing the room in a deep, impenetrable darkness. He sits half-upright, ducking beneath the too-low ceiling, and wriggles himself out of bed until his bare feet touch the ladder of his bunk bed.

He creeps down, one rung at a time, to the rhythms of his hyungs’ breathing fading into the thickened silence.

I̷̼̱̞͐͜ń̴͉̙̩ṣ̶̥̖̒̎̆̓͘͝è̷̺̺̝̺̃͂ͅǫ̶̡͍͔̖̉̄̋͘͜n̶͖͇͛̒g̶̢̙̼̼̱̈̾̎͋̆͘ fills his cramped lower bunk, mouth open, arm thrown across his mattress. Chanhee can’t fit himself into the small space between Inseong’s stomach and bent knee, but he can try, easing back the covers.

Maybe he’s done this too many times, worn on Inseong’s patience, because the moment he perches on the edge of I̷̼̱̞͐͜ń̴͉̙̩ṣ̶̥̖̒̎̆̓͘͝è̷̺̺̝̺̃͂ͅǫ̶̡͍͔̖̉̄̋͘͜n̶͖͇͛̒g̶̢̙̼̼̱̈̾̎͋̆͘’s bed, he shifts back, hooking his arm around Chanhee’s stomach.

Even asleep, I̷̼̱̞͐͜ń̴͉̙̩ṣ̶̥̖̒̎̆̓͘͝è̷̺̺̝̺̃͂ͅǫ̶̡͍͔̖̉̄̋͘͜n̶͖͇͛̒g̶̢̙̼̼̱̈̾̎͋̆͘ wraps his arms around Chanhee’s back and tugs him close, luring him with his even breaths, the steady comfort of his heartbeat. Chanhee curls up against him and closes his eyes.

▬▬▬

Up and down the line, their hands join. For the first time, the second, the last, and Chanhee hopes it’s every time, in front of tens, hundreds of fans that have made every late night and heartache and hospital trip worth it.

Together, on the stage that marks their d̸̡͔̟̰̍͑è̶͓ḇ̸̳̒͌ṵ̸̻͆̕͜t̸̫̝̬̮̽ and the very beginning of their lives, the n̴̺͗̕ͅi̵̠͖̗̍n̴͎̹̳̉̚͝e̵͚̝͑̌̏̋ of them dip their heads in a deep bow.

“To be sensation! Hello, we’re S̸̩͇̃͂͐͜F̴̛̫̬͔̞̱͑̋̅̿͘9̵̰̝̠̤̼̄!”

▬▬▬

When Chanhee wakes up, he can’t tell how long it has been—minutes, hours, or days—but Inseong is still beside him, bathed in rosy light. Expression complicated as his hand dips to Chanhee’s chest, over his heartbeat, tracing the satin of his ribbon with a complicated expression on his face.

Chapter Text

CHANHEE DREAMS OF DYING. Or more specifically, of death. In darkness like a swallowed star: when his eyes adjust, he sees crimson; wet, quivering walls, living. Runged slats of white bone like a cage. The heady, almost foul, scent of blood, scarring his lungs with every breath he takes.

And a mangled, beating heart, hanging above him like a bell in a tower, spots of black crawling upon its surface like a disease. Tracing veins, weeping cracks, mottled tissue descending like rainfall, filling Chanhee’s vision, his hands, his open mouth, closing the tunnel of his throat when he swallows.

Black on black on black on black bleeding, rotting to the core. A famined heart made of locusts, disintegrating when they part, and when it falls, Chanhee does too, purged like a virus. Thrown back into ribs and melting through bone, organ tissue, skin.

When the heart stops, the body follows. Crumpling, collapsing.

Chanhee suffocates within the core of himself until his last breath snuffs out.

▬▬▬

Chanhee dreams of dying. Or more specifically, of death. Of the collapsed underbelly of the mansion, cracked ceiling above his head. A supporting beam slanted across his abdomen and neck, pressing down on his windpipe.

He traces the floor around him, dizzy black dancing in his vision. Strikes dirt and upturned floorboards, scatterings of severed nails. Soft sawdust, trailing against his fingertips.

He takes a breath and inhales nothing, tightness clouding his chest; the impenetrable vice of almost-breathing, the hard plateau of his ribs against the underside of the beam, and the solid wall where they collide.

Dying. He’s dying, he’s—and he can’t breathe.

And it must be—eternity, Chanhee lies there, and no time at all. He can’t conjure a gun like Taeyang, doesn’t know how to reintroduce oxygen into his lungs, only the same fickle flame at the tips of his fingers, in a constant cycle of swelling up and burning out.

Until footsteps scuff the wooden floor, slow at first, hesitant, before erupting into a frenzy. Is that a shadow, or more darkness, as cool, tender hands shove at Chanhee’s arm, and a panicked voice rings through the air.

“C̶̺̥̍͗̍̃̋h̶̢̳̰̖̯̟̐͜ͅą̵̡̰͇̤̝̗̱͖͂͒̌͝n̴̲͓̞͕̈́̿̈́ǐ̷̡̢̪͔̜̩̦͎̓͆͑͋́̃͠—oh, g—you’re…” Youngbin’s head sags with relief, gaze brimming as he pushes Chanhee’s sweaty hair back from his forehead with a strangely intimate touch. “I don’t think I can get this thing off you alone, but I’m going to get help, okay? Okay? Can you hold on until then?”

Chanhee doesn’t think he can, how long has it been, how long has he—but the intensity of Youngbin’s gaze, the imploring concern, coaxes a nod out of him, his head rocking excruciatingly against the hard hard floor.

So, Youngbin disappears. The void swallows him up and spits him out and turns time outside itself, and Chanhee’s eyes are dry from waiting, the evitable preying on his chest like a gargoyle, his hands so limp by his sides he isn’t sure of what he’s feeling, what, air or shadows or nothing, nothing at all.

“What happened?” Back. Jaeyoon’s knees smack the ground beside Chanhee’s waist, the whites of his eyes tremoring in the darkness. “C̶̺̥̍͗̍̃̋h̶̢̳̰̖̯̟̐͜ͅą̵̡̰͇̤̝̗̱͖͂͒̌͝n̴̲͓̞͕̈́̿̈́ǐ̷̡̢̪͔̜̩̦͎̓͆͑͋́̃͠-̸̤̮̤̈́͊̓y̸̤̓ă̴͇̫͑. Have you known all this time? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Jaeyoon…” Juho steps forward, whole and hale, softness simmering in his gaze, and that’s how Chanhee knows something is terribly wrong.

He doesn’t even have enough air to scream.

Jaeyoon’s hands smack the floor, earthquake in his throat when he says, “He could’ve given us more time, Z̷̧̼̲̑̓͌́̚ụ̴̥̳̦̒̈́̔̔̐ͅh̸̖̒̐̈̚ơ̸̼͉̥̐̈̿̕ͅ,” as if Chanhee isn’t even there.

Youngbin seizes Jaeyoon’s wrist. “Maybe,” he says. “But all we can do is be here for him now.”

Acrid froth forms in Chanhee’s mouth. Is he already gone?

The three of them wrap their hands around the support beam, and, with a combined grunt of effort, hoist it up off Chanhee’s abdomen. Ravenous, desperate, Chanhee swallows so much air it makes him dizzy.

He forces himself up, choking, spitting sickly white foam onto the bare floor. Heaves as his elbows give way and his neck spins back, and the impact of the ground slams back up into his lungs.

“You should’ve told us, Č̵̡͍̒͜͝ḫ̴͇̮́ä̶̠́̆n̸͙̂͌i̴͖̦̿̽̎-̸̤̮̤̈́͊̓y̸̤̓ă̴͇̫͑,” Juho murmurs, expression mapped with an indiscernible expression.

“Why didn’t you?” Youngbin adds, hurt. The upright stalk of the support beam wobbles in his grasp, his knuckles taut and white around it. Why hasn’t he let go?

“We could’ve been there.” Pain, soldered in Jaeyoon’s dark, warped gaze. “We could’ve been there, and you took that chance away, don’t you understand?”

Their arms, becoming rigid in perfect synchronicity. The tip of the support beam revolves slowly, before fixing on a point right above Chanhee’s heart.

“I—don’t—” Chanhee wheezes, the moment before it plunges.

▬▬▬

Chanhee dreams of dying. Or more specifically, of death. Of lying prone, frozen-still and vulnerable, no sensation in his limbs. Of time, his awareness of it, but not how it passes.

Of the long, hollowed tones of a heart monitor as he fades in and out of consciousness.

His vision, multiplied by two times, three, layered into oblivion. Endless walls, cradled by shadow, that tearingachinggnawing pain in his chest like a lesion. Lead locked into his joints, his bones and muscles; that shuddering, frightening, tautness to his chest.

He closes his eyes as footsteps approach, slow and deliberate and expectant. Somehow, it’s a comfort, to think someone is waiting for him.

“Č̵̡͍̒͜͝ḫ̴͇̮́ä̶̠́̆n̸͙̂͌i̴͖̦̿̽̎-̸̤̮̤̈́͊̓y̸̤̓ă̴͇̫͑,” Inseong whispers, and Chanhee’s eyes fly open at the sound of his voice. “Come on.”

Where are we going? Chanhee thinks but doesn’t say, the words sewn up with his breath.

Smiling, Inseong extends his arm, fingers curled invitingly. Chanhee has no choice but to take it, and Inseong pulls him up, up, through his body, the petrified limbs that trap him like a coffin.

The first steps he takes are floating.

Where—

Inseong’s fingers curl around his. “Let’s go together,” he says, and when Chanhee hurries to follow him, he leaves nothing behind.

▬▬▬

Chanhee dreams of—

▬▬▬

From the uppermost plateau of the floating gardens, Youngkyun stares out, before hissing out a frustrated noise against his teeth and turning around, jerking an irritated thumb behind him. “We need to get out there,” he says, stamping a little in his white dress shoes. “What’s out there?”

Taeyang thinks about this, finger coiled in his ribbon. “I don’t know.”

Youngkyun’s eyes bug, and he drops back against the railing, aghast. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

Accused, Taeyang throws his hands up. “I woke up on the carriage, way after we got onto the property.”

Youngkyun spins to Jaeyoon, now a full-on interrogation. “What about you?” but Jaeyoon just shakes his head.

“Same here. I don’t remember.”

Youngkyun sets his jaw. He already knows better than to ask Chanhee, and if Seokwoo were here, he would say the same thing. Everything before the time they woke up is a blur, somewhere deep in the recesses of their minds, and, in return, the terrarium of Inseong’s estate has become their whole world.

Now that Chanhee can track the sun in perfect sequence, he’s gotten used to other things: the movement of ducks across the mirror pond; the gaits of horses being exercised in the paddock; the formations of birds across the cloud-streaked sky. Things that seemed habitual but were, in truth, repeated. Repeated motions, repeated cycles, cages of mundanity.

“Well, we need to find out,” Youngkyun says, a pout on the corner of his mouth. His hands press into the table with enough force that it appears to cave beneath his weight. “I don’t like this place. I don’t trust anyone, except you guys. And Seokwoo.”

Jaeyoon hums, rocking back in his chair. “If leaving was easy…” Then, he huffs a breath, snapping his biscuit in half and dunking it into his tea. “Inseong wouldn’t like it.”

Taeyang scoffs. “You care about what Inseong thinks?”

With the reflexive memories of Inseong’s mouth against his, Chanhee finds it hard not to. To trust, to not trust, to fall into him unwavering. Dreams and reality, threaded together even without a ribbon.

“Yes,” Jaeyoon says quickly, then, as if to redeem himself: “You’d follow Youngkyun anywhere,” Jaeyoon retorts, and Taeyang scowls, his gaze flickering to Chanhee.

“I’d follow anyone who could get me out,” Taeyang says, just shy of vulnerable. Tender. “I’m not going to be a sitting duck.”

Chanhee rises from his chair. Joins Youngkyun at the railing, stomach propped over the edge. Where he and Inseong were just days ago, or maybe earlier today—another revolution of the earth; another shake of the snowglobe.

“We couldn’t,” he says, and Youngkyun’s serious gaze scorches the side of his face.

“Why not?”

“Juho.” Bleeding out of his stomach, severed threads of ribbon. The glassy look in his eyes as he thrust the support beam into Chanhee’s chest. But he’s alive. He woke up, he’s— “We can’t leave without him.”

Taeyang swallows, eyes in wide-pools, reflecting the tea-stains on his saucer. “We can’t leave anyone behind.”

“Well, I’m not saying—” Youngkyun drags a hand through his long hair, and it ripples up in a fuzzy, cocoa cloud. “Wait. Juho has a ribbon?”

“Across his stomach,” Chanhee says like instinct. Practically written into his tongue. “The same place he got slashed.”

Inseong’s anguished tears, Juho’s head in his lap. Juho, Juho, Juho, on his pretty lips like a prayer, and Juho looking up at him to preserve his last sight—

How do you know my name? Echoes in Chanhee’s mind, pulling him up short. But, it’s quickly forgotten as Youngkyun’s mouth opens a second time.

“Right,” Youngkyun says, and this time, when Youngkyun’s hair stands up, it’s practically comical. “Well, I’m not okay with leaving anyone either. But we have to do something, and we can’t do it while waiting for the dreams to get us.”

Jaeyoon nods, head propped against his palm. “Striking sleep isn’t enough,” he concludes. Turning in his chair so that the toe of his shoe rests upon the back of Chanhee’s ankle. “We need to wake up.”

▬▬▬

As far as Chanhee knows, Seokwoo should be attending to Juho’s health with the assigned staff: measuring his medications, refreshing his bandages, stripping his bed clean. Instead, when Chanhee rounds the corner towards Juho’s room, the two staff are stationed outside the door, impassive and unruffled, the door shut behind them.

With Seokwoo nowhere to be seen.

“Has Seo—uh, Dr. Kim been here?” Chanhee asks to the staff on the right, a blond woman of a similar height to him, her hair scraped back tightly.

“Yes.” She nods slowly. “She did a short check-up on the patient a while ago, but then Mr. Kim ushered him away for some business.”

Chanhee frowns. Some attempt from Inseong to clear the air, maybe? Though, Chanhee doubts Seokwoo can be charmed out of his distrust.

“Which way did they go?”

The staff dips her head to the left. “I believe they went that way, Mr. Kang.”

Chanhee thanks her and strides further up the hallway, making a sharp right into a stairwell when he hears overlapping voices. Curiosity getting the better of him, he slips off his boots to ensure he makes no noise as he pads further onto the level below.

He finds the source of the voices easily: Inseong and Seokwoo, half-tucked in an alcove further down the hallway. From where Chanhee is standing, behind a wall at the bend of the stairs, he cannot be seen, but even still, he crouches down to eavesdrop on them through slatted wooden rails.

“—know you have them too,” Seokwoo accuses hotly, Chanhee struggling to hear him over the volume of his breath. “I just can’t figure out why.”

“I sleep, the same as the rest of you.”

“No, you dream,” Seokwoo insists, “you dream, and it doesn’t make sense to me. Why us? Why you?”

“I don’t know how the nexus works any better than—” Inseong protests, but Seokwoo throws an arm out, effectively trapping Inseong in the alcove.

“See, even that makes it obvious. When you appear, always at the right times, always when someone needs you—”

“Because I appear?” Irritation climbs Inseong’s throat like a plant. He’s shadowed, half-obscured by Seokwoo’s arm, but that much is clear just in the way he carries himself. “Because I couldn’t just stand watch? Does Chanhee know? That you didn’t wake him up in your first dream?”

First dream?

“See, how do you even know that?” Seokwoo exhales raggedly. “You shouldn’t know that. It was just me and him. I watched him die, Inseong.”

Chanhee stuffs his hand in his mouth to keep himself silent. Seokwoo’s first dream—it couldn’t have been him. Like Jaeyoon, Taeyang: a doppelganger, a fake. One that had chosen Seokwoo as its target.

Inseong laughs. “I’m sorry, but that’s a funny way to put it, right? You watched him die under your own hands—”

“—Inseong,” Seokwoo gnashes out, his voice wavering. “Stop. Stop—"

“—held him until his heart stopped—”

“—Inseong—”

“—before he even became a threat,” Inseong finishes, and Seokwoo dives down to his level, his next words dying against Inseong’s mouth.

Chanhee remembers himself as his fingernails gouge into the soft wood of the bannister. His breathing sharp and erratic.

Seokwoo must’ve been scared, all alone in his first dream. For Taeyang, killing Jaeyoon had been a survival strategy.

And Seokwoo had killed Chanhee before he even knew the hunt had begun. The question is—what threat did he sense?

▬▬▬

This time, when Chanhee is allowed access to Juho’s room, he’s already awake, blankets tucked rigidly up to his chin, and his wide, unblinking eyes fixed on the ceiling. His only acknowledgement of Chanhee’s approach is the minor swerve of his pupils, discerning, before they snap back into place.

“I recognise you,” he says, and Chanhee nods.

“I visited you before,” he replies, but Juho exhales sharply, head shifting back and forth against the pillow. “I brought you food.”

“Right. Pastries which I literally don’t have the stomach for”—Chanhee winces, as Juho pushes on—“but, memorable as that was, it’s not what I’m talking about,” he says. Clenches his fists with a full-body shudder, as though whatever impaled him the first time in running through him once more, in perpetuity. “You were there.”

The words surface in Chanhee’s breath, escape from him all in a breath. “Inseong and I—we heard you, but, we didn’t—”

Juho turns to him with blown eyes, pinprick pupils. A startling, knowing fear, in every contour of his face. “Inseong?”

“You didn’t know him before. You asked why he knew your name.”

Juho laughs, bubbling and unamused, acidic sharpness in every sound out of his chest. “You need to go,” he says.

“Juho—”

But Juho stares into his face with surprising conscience, “You shouldn’t be here, Ch̴̟̊ä̵̳ni̷̟͝,̴̓ͅ” and says that name again, glitching in his throat. “You need to go.”

Chanhee shakes his head. “When you’re recovered—”

“No.” Juho tears the duvet away from his body, bearing pink, healing skin, scabbed over, and a crackling ferocity in his eyes. “You can’t escape.”

“But, you said—”

“I’ve tried.” Horror, striking his features like a slap. Juho heaves several ragged breaths in rapid succession, his hands seizing open and closed over the sheets. “I’ve tried, I’ve tried, and it wasn’t—it wasn’t enough. Nothing—”

“You tried?” Chanhee surges forward, hands slamming into the bedpost beside Juho’s head. “What’s out there? Where did you—”

What happened?

Numbly, Juho’s hand scuttles down the span of his bandages, dark tributaries of ribbon visible through the cotton. His fingers jab the opening of the wound, and he hisses, face scrunching up in such open, honest pain that Chanhee finds himself grimacing in sympathy.

Then, with an almost out-of-body strength, he reaches for Chanhee’s lapel, yanking him forward so they are practically face-to-face. Up close, Juho’s jaw tremors with thinly-suppressed emotion, and when he speaks, spit flecks across Chanhee’s lips and chin.

“It won’t heal.” Hot breath, dragging across Chanhee’s mouth. His Adam’s apple jerks. “I’m stuck here.”

Chanhee hisses through his teeth as Juho keeps talking, amped and distressed, round and round. Things that snag Chanhee’s brain as significant, but he can’t make sense of them, like they process through Chanhee’s ears in a different language entirely.

He backs up to the very edge of Juho’s tether as if that will reset him, somehow, give him a buoy in all his floundering. There’s a key here. Something…

“They’ll find me,” Juho whispers, and Chanhee’s head jerks up, electric.

“Who?” he asks, though he knows the answer; he just needs to hear it out of Juho’s mouth to be sure.

Juho sets his jaw, lethal and serious. “You know,” he says. “They’re… different from us.”

“Hunting us,” Chanhee swallows. “The—fakes. The ones that don’t remember.”

Juho nods, denting his pillowcase in an increasingly deepening pit. “Nothing to remember,” and he murmurs, his fingers edging down his stomach once more. “These are the memories. And—” he cuts himself off, fixing on a point just beyond Chanhee’s back.

Juho’s bedroom door opening, a shadow slanting across the floor. Stopping just short of Chanhee’s heels.

“Forgetting is dangerous,” he finishes, just as Inseong steps into earshot, the warmth of his presence like a cloak at Chanhee’s back.

“You’re awake,” Inseong murmurs, nonplussed and something else, but it doesn’t seem to be relief. No—when Chanhee looks up at him, his suit is unrumpled, his hair neat, and his expression solidly, terrifically blank.

Chanhee backs up, almost tripping over himself.

And he doesn’t look right, not his I̸͍̙̕͝ń̷̢̫̾̑s̶͎̰̠͋̎e̸̗͘ͅö̶͍̬́̊̚ͅn̵̻̤̤̉̌̎g̷̤̉, unsmiling and untouched. In clothes he never wore, and his posture too straight, too stiff. Their I̸͍̙̕͝ń̷̢̫̾̑s̶͎̰̠͋̎e̸̗͘ͅö̶͍̬́̊̚ͅn̵̻̤̤̉̌̎g̷̤̉, that no amount of kisses and touches and lullabies would ever awaken.

Shaking his head, Chanhee makes a determined march out of the room, brain scrambled. Unsure of where his feet are taking him until he passes Jaeyoon’s room just as he’s stepping out of it, the door cracked open like it had been the first night they met, when Jaeyoon and Inseong—

“Chanhee?” Concern shadows his face, hands hovering around Chanhee’s shoulders. “Are you okay?”

And Chanhee could tell him about his conversation with Juho, what he overheard between Seokwoo and Inseong, but the words jam in his throat, unrelenting; all that comes out is: “Think I saw Seokwoo and Inseong kissing,” and maybe it’s in his head, the betrayal, the twist in his chest, but when Jaeyoon laughs, it’s the most relieving thing he’s heard since waking up the first time.

Jaeyoon’s hand presses against the bone of Chanhee’s shoulder, and he breathes out.

“What,” Jaeyoon says, a grin teasing at the corners of his mouth, “do you want to do something about it?”

Before Chanhee can respond, Lucy squeaks and hustles around the hallway, a teetering mop bucket in hand; where she is silent, her scarlet cheeks say everything.

Jaeyoon’s hand presses to his stomach as he laughs, rich and full-bodied, eyes creased, cheeks flushed with the force of it ringing up through his throat.

“What,” Chanhee asks, laughing airily through his throat, “did you know she was there?”

“No.” Jaeyoon shakes his head, knocks a tear from his eye with his knuckle. “But, I guess we should’ve… expected it, right?” Then, Chanhee grimaces as Jaeyoon’s hand settles on his head to ruffle his hair. “Someone’s always listening.”

▬▬▬

“Chanhee.” By the light of the moon, Seokwoo sneaks into his bedroom after midnight, and though he only missed a night, it feels brand new when his silhouette fills the lit doorway, when he shuts the door behind him and crosses the floor on bare feet.

Sitting up, Chanhee switches on the lamp, illuminating Seokwoo in snatches of gauzy amber: slanted across his jaw, tucked into the creases of one arm, pooling like spilled honey in his collarbones. Beneath the hand he keeps delicately poised across his throat like a bandage.

And when Seokwoo crawls into his bed, it’s brand new. The mattress dipping, sinking beneath his weight; his leg, grazing against Chanhee’s beneath the duvet.

“Wasn’t expecting you,” Chanhee says. “I was just about to fall asleep.”

Seokwoo smiles, faint. “I was hoping yesterday wasn’t a fluke.”

Chanhee shrugs. Levels his gaze at Seokwoo. “Inseong helped.”

At that, Seokwoo’s expression darkens a shade. “Do you really trust him that much?” he murmurs, discomfort spanning the space between his brows. “You shouldn’t, you know. You should—”

“Kiss him?” Chanhee mutters, and though Seokwoo winces, it isn’t that which makes Chanhee’s mouth dry.

The pained screwing of his face. The gritting of his teeth. His fingers, sliding across his neck with no sense of friction, revealing loose, dark ribbon—

“It’s not what you—” Seokwoo exhales, laboured, “how did you—”

—and the weeping rendition of a smile, scarlet streaked across his throat.

“Seokwoo—”

“He untied my ribbon, Chanhee,” Seokwoo says, slow and deliberate, like punching the words out on a typewriter. “He—I should’ve—I don’t trust him—”

“—but you got caught up anyway,” Chanhee finishes, because, of course. Inseong is—alluring, captivating, enrapturing; he’s known that, sensed that from the beginning. But where he was drawn in, Seokwoo hovered a safe distance away, always standoffish, always distrusting. So much so that he killed Chanhee's fake upon first meeting. Despite himself, Chanhee believes in that instinct as surely as anything else. Cutting that away, Seokwoo is wide-eyed and frightened underneath. “Has that always been there? The slit.”

“No,” Seokwoo replies. “I tried—I thought I could retie it, but—”

It won’t heal strikes Chanhee’s brain like a match.

“Let me try.” Chanhee surges forward in the bed, his knees causing permanent dents in Seokwoo’s thighs, but the ribbon is blood-slick, slipping through his fingers, red lashings on his knuckles and palms. It’s like his hands won’t cooperate. Not to make the two loops like bunny-ears, to draw one around the other.

The two ends fall loose from his grasp.

“It’s not…” Seokwoo rubs the side of his head, his sagging, sleep-smudged eyes. “It won’t—C̸̪̭͑hà̵͇n̴̕i̸̐—”

Chanhee’s hand punches into the mattress cover. “What did you—”

But then Seokwoo falls forward, white-faced, head cradled in his hand, and when Chanhee lunges for him, he seems to fall right through, spinning to face him in the cavernous darkness.

“̸̗͐T̴o̷ ̷̠̌b̶̊e̸̅ ̷͇̈́s̷e̶n̴͊s̵̛a̷͒t̵í̴on̷̽!̶̜̇ ̶͒H̶͌e̷̛l̵l̸o̷͒,̷̰͘ ̴̮̂ẅ̸́e̶̓’̶͊r̷̈́ȅ̸ ̴̮͘S̷̫̔F̶̲͘9̷͓̍!”

Seokwoo’s face, frozen, eyes permanently wide, as his head is cleaved free from his neck and plummets to the floor at Chanhee’s feet.

Bile rises in his throat. He turns, half-steps through a puddle of blood. Taeyang, held aloft by the sword plunged through his temple.

Jaeyoon, sprawled and still, blood-petals surrounding the bullet hole in his back.

Turns again. Youngkyun, crimson seeping up to his shoulders and splattered across his shirt, his arms severed short at the elbow.

And again: Youngbin, clutching his legs with an expression of pure terror on his face.

Again. Juho, limp, bloody hands and the handle of a knife, guts and tissue spilling out around the blade.

Agai—

A face, too close, that Chanhee hasn’t seen before, eye-socket slick and stripped and empty.

Chanhee’s own heart pulls, pushes, shoving against his bones, his ribcage, threatening to burst out of his chest, and he gasps, doubles over. Retches and retches, bile and saliva pouring out of his mouth until his palms sting, hitting the floor, and his eyes are wet, and he’s heaving nothing but air when his body swears there’s more to come.

More. More. The absence is so keenly felt.

Chapter Text

IT DOESN’T OCCUR TO Chanhee until later, after he’s relived and rewound the images in his head hundreds and thousands of times. As he’d moaned a silent plea, slumped over, clutching his legs with the last of his strength, it had been easy for Chanhee to miss the black satin mummifying Youngbin’s shins and ankles, tied off around the soles of his feet.

A path for Chanhee to follow, leading him right to Youngbin.

He hasn’t been seen, not since dragging Juho’s limp body behind him, face pale and stretched into an expression of terror, but—Chanhee needs to find him.

As expected, he’s nowhere to be found along the gilded hallways, nor in the glittering pockets of jewels and champagne-fizz, the terrace of sitting-rooms along the garden, ducks taking flight off the mirror-pool in the distance.

Chanhee pushes further through, against a current of young women draining flutes and making comments about the paintings that Chanhee instinctively identifies as nonsensical. As he shoulders past one woman in a blush gown, her arm swings back, glass emptying its contents down the front of Chanhee’s shirt.

He blinks, jarred, as wet fabric clings uncomfortably to his skin.

“Chanhee,” Inseong says breathlessly, like he ran a full lap of the mansion to get here, before his eyes trail down the darkened splotch across Chanhee’s blazer and shirt. Immediately, he reaches for a handkerchief to press to Chanhee’s breast. “I’m sorry. Do you need a change of clothes?”

“No, it’s—it’ll dry,” Chanhee sighs. “It’s fine.”

“At least let me walk you to—”

“Do you know where Youngbin is?” Chanhee interrupts, and Inseong startles, clearly not expecting for that to be the next question out of Chanhee’s mouth.

“Well, not certainly…” Inseong says slowly, then seizes Chanhee’s shoulder, peering at him critically. “Is everything alright?”

“I need to talk to him.” Chanhee shrugs off Inseong’s hand. “I just need to know where to find him.”

“Well, if he’s on a ride, he could be anywhere around the estate.” Inseong chews on his lower lip, a hand rubbing at the thatch of hair at the nape of his neck. “Um. Perhaps one of the stablehands could let you know which trail he might’ve taken?”

“Okay. Thanks.” Chanhee slips past, swiftly dodging the arm Inseong puts out to stop him. “What?”

Inseong dips his head to the side, deep in thought, before a perplexing emotion crosses his features. He shakes his head. “Nothing,” he murmurs, clearly perturbed. “Ride safely, Chanhee.”

With any luck, Chanhee won’t need that particular sentiment.

He hurries outside, dizzying heat beating down on his skin. Out in the sunken courtyard, some of the men have set up croquet, Youngkyun included—Chanhee recognises him from his fluffy hair and the sunburned glimpses of his shoulders where his sleeves detach. He lifts his head up from his swing and waves Chanhee over, but Chanhee shakes his head, continuing up the path as Taeyang gestures impatiently for Youngkyun to keep playing.

The stables and paddock lie beyond the fenced part of the grounds, an area Chanhee has only been to once, when he let Youngkyun talk him into joining a morning hunt. The horses are grazing peacefully in patches of shade, while an assortment of stablehands muck out their stalls with sweat beading on their brows.

Chanhee takes a deep breath before approaching one. “I’m looking for someone. Who might’ve taken one of the horses out. Uh. Kind of tall. Bright red hair.”

“Youngbin? Oh, you just missed him.” The man huffs, sticks his rake into the ground to lean on it. “He went that way, towards the woods, but that one likes to hack off-trail sometimes. Do you want me to send a message out to the house when he returns?”

Chanhee drags a hand through his hair—that’s too long. Chanhee would have no idea where to find him, definitely doesn’t want to go as far as finding out where he sleeps.

“Can’t I just. Go after him?” he asks instead, and the stablehand shrugs.

“Give me a minute to tack up the horse, and you’ll be good to go.”

Helmet secured under his chin, Chanhee starts on the trail, horse’s hooves kicking up a mixture of dirt and shredded grass. The stablehand must’ve noted Chanhee’s relative inexperience, because the stallion moves with a fast yet solid gait, allowing Chanhee to adapt to its steady rhythm, even as he grips its mane and bridle with vice-like hands.

The horse does not slow as they enter the gaping mouth of the woods. Beneath the thick foliage of interlocking trees, the air is sweeter, cooler, and Chanhee finds it easier to breathe, his eyes aching a little less without the sun’s heavy glare.

And, amidst the muted colours of the forest, the faint melody of bird song, it’s impossible not to spot the shock of crimson beneath the stark black of a riding helmet, peeking out between an intricate trellis of leaves.

Youngbin. It has to be.

Chanhee urges his horse faster, blitzing across the forest floor. A cacophony of snapping twigs and shattered branches.

Youngbin turns his head, just for a moment, before jerking his horse into a gallop.

Chanhee hisses through his teeth. That confirms it then. The Youngbin he saw in his dream was the real thing, and if that’s true, he must remember Chanhee’s face as keenly as anything else.

The horse picks up speed, sensing Chanhee’s agitation, his desperation, and the world blurs, mud and mulch and scattering leaves, bleeding from red to green to gold, seasons cycling without reprieve. Until they break into a clearing, wind whipping, sky so wide and blue above them, and Youngbin's horse judders to a reckless halt, whinnying. He careens round in a haphazard canter as Chanhee beckons his horse to a stop, unsettled by the openness, the silence.

Then, Youngbin brandishes his hunting rifle from his back and braces it against his shoulder.

Staring down the barrel of a gun for the second time in his life, Chanhee’s emotions fluctuate between panic, frustration, and an eerie sense of calm. Last time, it was a dream. This time, it’s reality, and yet a single bullet could pulverise his brains all the same.

And it wasn’t Chanhee’s famed silver tongue or diplomacy that saved him last time.

Instead, he holds his hand up in immediate surrender, bares his ribbon with the other. Scrunches his eyes shut and prays.

Silence. Long-suffering, filled only with Chanhee’s tentative breaths, the climbing poundpoundpound of his heart.

Until Youngbin laughs, hoarse and distressed and thick with tears. “What is there to be afraid of?” he demands, and it doesn’t sound like a taunt, a stinging slap, but rather an honest, genuine question.

Chanhee opens his eyes.

Youngbin’s face is white, drained, the back of his rifle twisting into his shoulder with bruising force. “There’s nothing,” he says, followed by a sickening heave of his chest, eyes bright with tears. They spill over onto his cheeks, flushed bright with exertion against the stark pallor of his skin. “You’re already dead. If I shoot you now, you’ll wake up again like a puppet, you’ll wake up, and—”

His words are cut off by gunfire, his finger striking true against the trigger. The heat from the bullet scorches the side of Chanhee’s face, a faint sizzling against his cheek and ear, before burying itself into a tree behind them.

The resounding crack is deafening. One, two seconds before a branch splinters and falls, crashing violently to the earth below.

Chanhee twists his reins into nooses around his hands, dark, angry welts blooming across his palms and fingers.

Dead.

He’s seen it, known it. Felt himself die a million times, seen it in Jaeyoon, in Juho, in the gutted chasm of an eye.

Stricken, Youngbin drops the rifle and buries his face in his hands. Wide, unblinking eyes and a parted mouth, shadowed by trembling fingers. “I nearly…”

“You didn’t,” Chanhee says. Thinks of Taeyang, the sharp line of his arm. How, if he hadn’t hesitated, Chanhee wouldn’t have even come this far. “It’s not even the first time.”

Youngbin scrubs the tears from his face. “You were in my dream. You were—”

“Real. The only one,” Chanhee confirms. “The others—”

“—are dead too.” Youngbin swallows. “I don’t remember what it’s supposed to be like. Living, I mean.”

Chanhee readjusts himself on his saddle. “Can you show me where you found Juho?” he asks.

At little more than a trot, Youngbin guides him to a small pocket of trees towards the western edge of the property. Without rain, one of the trunks and surrounding earth is still splattered with Juho’s blood.

Even so far from the mansion. The whole estate. How far…?

“Is he.” Youngbin stops to take a breath, then doesn’t restart his sentence.

“He won’t heal,” Chanhee says. “Dead bodies don’t.”

Seokwoo’s neck, its dripping, scarlet smile. Last night, scrambling to Seokwoo’s room, they’d managed to stop the bleeding, but the scar remains, deep and gaping. The ends of his ribbon feeding down into his shoulders.

Youngbin makes a strangled sound, resting his forehead into the heel of his hand. “I can’t stay here,” he says, a desperate edge to his voice, then he whirls to Chanhee, voice hoarse with pain. “How do you do it?”

Chanhee presses his knees into his horse’s flank and tugs it to a stop. “Go then,” he says, and Youngbin falters.

“Uh—huh?”

“Go,” Chanhee repeats. “Find out what’s outside.”

“What?” Youngbin’s irises quiver. “What does that change?”

Chanhee grinds his teeth. “Nothing. Everything.”

If there's a way out. If there isn't. How many puppets have died wearing his face?

Startling Chanhee out of his thoughts, Youngbin throws his arm back. “Come with me,” he says.

“Why?”

Youngbin's gaze flickers to his lap, then back up to Chanhee. “When I said you were already dead, you didn't scream, or freak out, or cry. It was just something you accepted. I…” Youngbin blows out a breath. “You clearly believe this—hell isn't it for us. Not like this. It makes me want to believe it too, even if I don't understand why.”

Like Seokwoo’s paranoia. Taeyang’s survival instincts. Youngkyun’s desire to fit in.

Chanhee urges his horse up alongside Youngbin’s, allowing them to fall into step. Accelerating from a trot to a canter, as the sunshine dissipates overhead, the world blurs around them, and ravenous white fog blooms in the spaces between.

▬▬▬

Inseong steps into Chanhee’s room as the last lights of afternoon die into a cloudy evening. Chanhee sits cross-legged on his bed, still sore and disoriented from his ride and nap. Watches, as Inseong makes eye-contact, and his impassive expression breaks into one of ardent hurt: drenched, melting eyes, and pouting lips that droop at the corners, brow furrowed into something like confusion.

“What?” Chanhee asks, splayed palms sinking into the folded duvet behind him.

Inseong lifts his hands, then aborts the motion, allowing them to fall flat by his sides. His rings flash in the last of the sunlight.

“I looked for you earlier,” he says, seeming to scan Chanhee’s face. Scrutiny, veiled thinly behind all his hushed words. “I couldn’t find you. I—know you tried to leave, Chanhee.”

Chanhee considers this. He thought he was Inseong’s guest, the estate’s captive, but perhaps those are one in the same thing. “Can’t I?” he asks.

“I just don’t understand why you would,” Inseong says, and maybe it’s that it’s too long for a clear, resounding no, but it doesn’t spike the same, childish stubbornness in Chanhee’s blood. Instead, the heightened petulance to Inseong’s tone unfurls thick syrup in Chanhee’s veins, pooling in his stomach. “Is there really something out there that I can’t give you? There’s nothing out there. Nothing.”

“Are you… sulking?”

Inseong frowns, making quick work of undoing the interlocked gold clasp over his stomach. Like an angel stripping its wings, he removes his jacket, steps out of his shoes, becomes glass and fragile and human again, down to the rosiness flushed unevenly across his cheeks. “I just want to be enough for you,” he murmurs, gaze flickering to the floor. When he lifts his head once more, his gaze is as steadfast as it is intense, the whiskey of his eyes lit and burning.

Inseong’s knee strikes the bed first, his hands, the warmth of his body, enveloping Chanhee like an embrace. He crashes back against his pillows as Inseong looms over him, expression gently intent. “If you’re so desperate to leave,” he breathes, a hot rush against Chanhee’s mouth, “I want to give you a reason to stay.”

The next parts are a blur, a white noise song against Chanhee’s ears. His jacket and undershirt from the bed to the floor. Unbuttoning Inseong’s shirt to take in the softened, alluring planes of his abdomen. Inseong’s stomach, quivering with his breath to fill the curve of Chanhee’s palm.

Chanhee lifts his arm to trace the arches of Inseong’s shoulder blades, caress the trail of his spine. His hand flat over the small of Inseong’s back, his waistband, memorising the shape of his hipbone against Chanhee’s palm.

No ribbons where their hearts touch, finding each other through skin. Nor his back, where Jaeyoon’s is, where Chanhee roams the flushed heat of his skin, over and over again. Not his wrists, his thighs, his neck… Not where their lips meet, where it becomes small and unimportant, where all Chanhee can think of is Inseong and nothing else.

It’s only after, much later, or maybe no time at all, when Inseong’s leg is settled between Chanhee’s thighs, his face nestled in the crook of Chanhee’s neck, that Chanhee remembers himself.

Seokwoo’s distrust, Youngbin’s fear. Inseong’s mouth on Chanhee’s like a shortening leash. Like hiding the glass walls of the snow-globe behind a shower of glitter, so Chanhee won’t long for the world outside.

And Chanhee is still lying here, cradled by luxury sheets and Inseong’s skin against his, sober and so, so willing, like some subconscious, animal part of him could watch the mansion implode around him, and he would still be content to stay here in Inseong’s arms.

Heavy-lidded, he's drawn from his thoughts as Inseong's hand pauses its conquest of Chanhee’s ribs, caressing delicate shapes into his skin, and scuttles upwards towards his chest. Two fingers trace the dark stitching of his ribbon in tentative, thoughtful motions; unravelling this, Chanhee's breath hitches as Inseong's thumb carelessly catches in the loop of his bow and tugs.

Chanhee jolts as pain lances through him. “What are you doing,” he hisses, thready, unwound, panic causing him to gouge his fingers into the mattress below.

Seokwoo's undone ribbon. Blood down his neck like a salivating smile. The flickering. Chanhee screws his eyes shut tight, but the images persist, a vicious onslaught.

“Hm?” Inseong hums into his bare skin, and it's grounding and excruciating all at once, the vibration making the pain flare up across his heart like the ground zero of an explosion. “Shh. It's okay, Chanhee. Just let me do this, okay? Then it'll all be—”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Chanhee chants, another deliberate tug eliciting a groan from his lips He tries to slap Inseong's hand away, but, sapped of strength, only manages to push weakly at his knuckles.

Staying strong aside, it hurts, and Chanhee doesn't understand why Inseong doesn't seem to care.

Still, this gets him to stop. Chanhee cracks open one eye as Inseong extricates his thumb from the satin loop and gently hovers his hand over Chanhee’s heart, adjusting himself onto one elbow so he can face Chanhee with a hypnotically soft expression, his features a puddle of apology.

“I’m sorry,” he says, rich and smooth, a herbal salve over searing skin. Pain keeps Chanhee from keeping his eyes open fully, so they flutter in-between, and Inseong sits up to pass a hand over his eyelids. “I don’t want to see you hurt. Not at all. Please trust me.”

“Inseong—”

Inseong’s fingers stir gently over Chanhee’s chest in repetitive, butterfly-wing motions. “It’s easier for both of us if you don’t resist,” he coos, half-lidded and imploring, that gesture over Chanhee’s heartbeat lulling Chanhee again and again and again. “Let me do this, and the pain will fade away. Nothing will have to hurt, ever again. Don’t you want that?” He bites his lip. “Isn’t that why you tried to leave?”

Inseong holds in his breath like asking for permission, and Chanhee’s head spins. Where was he running to? What is there left to be afraid of?

“Trust me,” Inseong says again, as evening unspools across the sky outside, dark and smudged and threaded with cloud. The low light renders him chromatic, save for the soulful cocoa of his gaze as it suspends itself over Chanhee’s sternum with unflinching focus. “Everything will be fine. It can finally be…”

“Fine?” Chanhee echoes. Gunshot blast in his ears. It’s cold, when did it get so—and Inseong’s eyes widen above him, and the croak in his throat is from where his voice dragged louder than it should be, shattering the glittering veil that made this— “I’m dead.”

Inseong falters. His face crumples; he rocks above Chanhee, sniffing, tears falling sticky on his cheeks. “Dead,” he repeats, wavering high and lost. He wipes his eyes with a curve of his wrist. “How did you…”

“Youngbin told me.”

Inseong rolls his lips into his mouth. Swallows. “Youngbin? Who else—”

Chanhee shrugs. “Anyone else who might’ve figured it out. You.”

“Chanhee, I—” Inseong’s hands jerk away from Chanhee’s skin, as if afraid to touch him. “I thought I would scare you away. But, then you—”

“Left anyway,” Chanhee finishes. “How long, Inseong?”

“As long as…” Inseong shakes his head. “I’ve wanted to tell you all this time.”

Chanhee’s chest jerks with a hollow laugh. “So, I would stay.”

Inseong lies back down, the distance between their bodies scant yet real; a tangible, impassable wall. “I’m different to all of you. I don’t have anything tying me to you.”

“The dreams,” Chanhee says. “The nexus.”

Inseong rolls onto his side, his jaw denting the corner of Chanhee’s pillow. Arm just shy of slotting between them. “Is that enough?”

There’s no answer to that.

Chanhee stares at the ceiling, sleep pulling at his eyes. They’ll have to get up eventually, to face the world, the next event downstairs. Or, as the shadows play on the ceiling, deepen the corners of his vast room, will the darkness get to them first? Will it be Inseong that Chanhee watches die next, as the real one suffocates beside him?

“It’s my room,” Chanhee says finally, as Inseong’s mouth curves delicately in his periphery. “‘M not going to be leaving.”

▬▬▬

It isn't the truth that stirs Chanhee awake, a little before moonrise, alertness sharpened in his veins. Instead, it’s something in Inseong’s even breaths, his soft, unmasked face while sleeping. Dead, as they all are, but by the same trick of the light, so alive.

The shadows of the nexus follow Chanhee out of bed, a dry smoke settling over the low parts of his brain. He dresses by strips of moonlight off the mirror, stockings slipping on the wood-panel floor.

Inseong was lying. Chanhee can’t identify where, or what, or how much, but he’s certain of it.

Sparing one last glance at Inseong to check he’s still asleep, Chanhee picks up his boots and pads out into the hallway, as its familiar layout melts around him and reforms into thick, inky darkness.

His eyes adjust quickly, and he’s able to try to navigate without relying on the walls for support. He’s in a part of the mansion he doesn’t recognise, all distinguishing features flattened by shadow and lost to ash that scatters with his steps, his slow, heavy breaths.

Chanhee creeps forward, ever-aware of the brittle silence; the way he gives himself away as prey with the sound of his footfalls, wood creaking as it settles beneath his weight.

The narrow corridor beckons him, ramrod-straight further than his eyes can perceive. Sections seeming to chop-up and repeat, stretching longer than anything Chanhee has seen in the light, as if he could look down and see he is jutting out over open air, a crumbling diving-board to his death.

If something else doesn’t find him first.

The silence is so proud and still it’s a threat. Hairs rising on Chanhee’s arms, his brain filling in the blanks. Footsteps that echo Chanhee’s in the darkness, the haunted, icy feeling of being stalked.

He doesn’t notice the dead end until his foot strikes debris, a collapsed ceiling beam slamming into his heel. Rubble truncating the passage like cotton stuffed into a wound, dilapidated and desperate. Chanhee shoves at a chunk of plaster, but it crumbles without giving under the force of his hands.

No way through. He backs up, nimbly avoiding the beam, as something cracks in the distance. Chanhee’s head snaps to the right, trying to identify the cause, but—another blocked-off hallway, a handful of doors, another crossroads. No one to be seen.

Chanhee makes a hurried gambit left.

It soon becomes apparent that this level of the nexus is an endless winding knot, each corridor indistinguishable from the last. The deeper he goes, the tighter his options become, until he loses all sense of where he is.

He only knows he’s approached the heart of the maze when there’s nothing left. Nowhere to go but the hallway at his back, solid wall closing in on his flanks.

And a single, ominous door, INSEONG etched into the wood.

Chanhee lunges forward, fingers wrapping around the handle as it dissipates like water between his fingers.

The floor evacuates beneath his feet. Chanhee lurches forward, stumbling, until a hand clamps around his arm and yanks him upright.

Chanhee wrestles his now-throbbing limb from Jaeyoon’s grasp. “Jaeyoon—”

“Did you just come from Inseong’s room?” Jaeyoon demands, eyes wide. Chanhee nods, so Jaeyoon surges for his collar. “Let me see your heart.”

Startled, Chanhee doesn’t resist as Jaeyoon swiftly unbuttons his jacket and yanks aside his shirt, two of Jaeyoon’s fingers ghosting above the black scar etched into Chanhee’s heart.

“I’m fine,” Chanhee says, his voice a little hollow. More than anyone, Jaeyoon seemed to have a genuine closeness with Inseong, so why… “I’m. I thought you trusted Inseong.”

Jaeyoon’s eyes dip, half-lidded, scanning Chanhee’s chest as though he has a fixation. “I do,” he says, rushed out of his mouth. He blows out a breath. “Instinctively, I do. But…”

Jaeyoon’s fingers curl over Chanhee’s skin, a cage trapping his heartbeat. Pauses, long and stifling.

“You’re the one who keeps dragging me in,” he murmurs finally. “Maybe I would be with Inseong right now, if I hadn’t met you. Maybe not, since he’s always so taken with you. But, that hypnotic effect he has on the other guests… That’s what you have, on me.”

Chanhee stutters, scarcely drawing breath, until Jaeyoon laughs, softly, and readjusts Chanhee’s shirt, his jacket. Replacing layers and layers between them, so Chanhee can find his voice again.

“He didn’t take it,” he says, as much as a reminder to himself as it is a reassurance to Jaeyoon. “How’s Seokwoo?”

“Still flickering. It’s further apart now, like the break is healing, but…” Jaeyoon takes a deep breath. “The ribbon damage; I think it’s permanent. No matter who inflicts it. We need to protect ours no matter what, Chanhee.”

“Right,” Chanhee says. “The ribbons tell you what’s real.”

“More than that.” Jaeyoon shakes his head. “I think they could be the key to escape.”

Chanhee exhales. “There is no escape.”

“What?” Jaeyoon’s voice wavers, terror seeping in through the cracks. “What do you mean there’s no escape?”

Chanhee swallows. “There’s nothing out there. Youngbin and I tried, but—then Inseong told me himself.”

“No escape,” Jaeyoon repeats. Drags a hand down his face, red streaks blooming in the wake of his fingers, then sets his jaw. “You need to go back to Inseong. He’s not…”

“He’s not trapped,” Chanhee says. “If anything, he’s doing the trapping.”

Jaeyoon tips his head to the side. “Is he?” he murmurs, eyes dipped low in thought. “Then why does he want you to want to stay? Why worry that you can escape? Why get close to us at all?”

When he says it like that, it’s easy to follow Jaeyoon’s way of thinking. “Because he can’t, can he? That’s why he’s afraid of the information we have. Because he wants us to be like him.”

“I wonder why that is,” he murmurs, eyes dipped low in thought. “What does this life mean to him? What’s so important about staying?”

Chanhee creeps back to his room in record time, as stirring and ambient noise signifies the beginning of the party below. Maybe he’s too late. Maybe, somehow, while he was in the nexus, Inseong already woke up.

But when Chanhee eases open his door, Inseong is still there, head half-slipping from his pillow, mouth open against the mattress, duvet draped over his waist, the small of his back. Chanhee sets down his shoes, discards his jacket, and crawls back into bed, left cold in his absence.

When he lays down, Inseong’s heavy arm winds around his waist, his hot breath fanning over Chanhee’s nape. Filling his arms with Chanhee’s presence like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

What does this world mean to Inseong? If Chanhee reached out to him to leave, would Inseong take his hand?

Chapter Text

“DEAD,” TAEYANG SAYS, HIS hands folded across his lap. He’s taken the chair beside Juho’s bedside, Youngkyun leaning on its arm like standing up unassisted is too much for him, as Taeyang tips his head back, groaning. “That explains a lot.”

“All of us? Or just…” Seokwoo gestures to his neck, where his bandaged throat is disguised by a thick, satin choker.

“Is that the connection?” The back of Jaeyoon’s suit jacket folds up, revealing a golden sliver of skin, as he runs a thumb down the ribbon stitched into his spine. “I was beginning to think they were a death sentence.”

Juho shivers. “Or a promise,” he says. Seokwoo has taken off his bandages, applied a greasy, white salve layered over jagged scar tissue, but the line of the original wound remains pink, fresh. Unhealing, just as Juho had put it.

“A target,” Youngkyun says, nodding first at Seokwoo, then at Chanhee. “For more than just the fakes. If there's a line between them and Inseong at all, I mean.”

“He feels real to me,” Jaeyoon says, unfaltering, even when Taeyang shoots him a derisive look.

“There is,” Chanhee agrees, because, to him, that much is obvious. Because beyond the ribbon Inseong doesn't have, the ones he's tried to take, there's—the connection. The affinity. The fact that, if Inseong was trapping them, there would be no need to beg Chanhee to stay, no terror over what he could know. No, Inseong's as trapped as them, but maybe in his own his head, his own motives, most of all.

Chanhee takes a seat at the end of Juho’s bed, mattress dipping beneath his weight. For once, the afternoon is blessedly empty and peaceful, unhurried like the wind streaming in through the windows and lifting the curtains into wings.

“Not when it came to the ribbons,” Taeyang mutters harshly, stiff jaw propped in his hand. “He tries to take yours and Seokwoo’s the same way those fakes came after Juho. He’s hunting us the same way.”

Chanhee considers this. Levels Taeyang with a steady gaze. “Then why stop?”

“What?”

“He hesitated,” Seokwoo murmurs, with a long exhale, like it defeats him to admit it. “I was… distracted. Inseong could’ve taken my ribbon easily if he hadn’t stopped. But, he did.”

Taeyang presses his lips together, tilts his head away. Chanhee can't tell if that's because he doesn’t have an answer, or if it's because he does, and he just doesn't want to say it.

“So, all we know is that he’s not ruthless,” Youngbin says, with that same wide-eyed look he’s had to every new revelation. He rises from his crouch by the door to step further into the room. “But we still don’t know why Inseong or the fakes want the ribbons. Or what they do.”

“What they don't,” Juho says, a bitter offset to his tone. “They're a burden. Nothing else.”

Youngkyun hums, fingers trailing across the ribbon encircling his wrist. “You know, the dolls and the fakes are different.”

Youngbin’s eyebrows quirk in a frown. “Dolls?”

“You know,” Youngkyun gestures vaguely, “the guests. The staff. They don’t—see these, like the fakes do. Or even Inseong, I guess.”

Youngbin looks around, with his hands out, still puzzled. “Not dead.”

“No, more like…” Youngkyun taps his chin, thoughtful, “puppets, acting in a play.”

Seokwoo exhales. “Yeah, maybe the guests,” he says, but there’s an edge to his voice, a hurt, simmering in the undercurrent. Seokwoo, who fit seamlessly into the crowd from day one. Who guests would flutter around, almost as ardently as Inseong himself. If Youngkyun and Chanhee started on the outside, then Seokwoo began on the inside, and at the centre of it— “Lucy’s different.”

“Or she’s just the same,” Chanhee says quietly, pulling his legs up onto the bed. Seokwoo’s head snaps to him, equal parts surprised and irritated and stricken. “You know what I mean. You’re the one who said it. The staff gossip, and then they stop, like they’re conditioned. Reprogrammed.”

“Because of Inseong, not because—” Seokwoo stops himself, expression clouding. His lips part in silence. “You don’t think both things can be true? Chanhee?”

A laugh cuts out of Chanhee’s throat, sharp and acidic. “I barely know what’s true at all.”

Awake, they’re addled with tension and confusion, anxious, bated breath before every corner. Asleep, the fakes prowl the nexus, wearing each other’s faces.

Since getting here, the quietest night Chanhee has had was the one when Inseong sung him to sleep, and even then, his dreams were disordered and full of confusion.

“In the dream you and Youngbin shared,” Jaeyoon starts, his hand braced on the wall beside him. His tone quiet, but commanding enough that not only Chanhee, but everyone’s gaze drifts to him. “How did it go?”

Chanhee recounts the dream in vivid detail, counting off on his fingers as he goes: “Seokwoo was beheaded. Taeyang—it was the fake of him, with the sword. That was from a different dream. And the fake of you, that Taeyang shot in the back. Youngkyun was missing both of his arms. Juho’s stomach was coming out. Youngbin was clutching his legs. My heart was starting to hurt.”

Jaeyoon hums, eyes half-lidded with a quiet, focused intensity. “And how did it end?”

Youngbin runs his thumb along his lower lip. “An eye. Actually, it was an empty eye-socket.”

Taeyang cocks his head at Jaeyoon. “What?”

Jaeyoon holds his fingers aloft. “Two things,” he says. “One—those places where we did in Chanhee and Youngbin’s dream, are the places we have our ribbons now. Not only that, but even the fakes are consistent. I think it’s fair to agree that that was how we died, and that somehow links into why those places are so significant to the fakes now.”

“And?” Youngkyun prompts.

“Two—we’re missing someone. The final person, with a ribbon over their eye. They could be on their way here, right now.”

Realisation dawns on Seokwoo’s face as clearly as the frustrated noise he releases into his palm. He tips back against Juho’s bedpost. “Inseong’s soiree. Is it a coincidence he’s bringing us here?”

Chanhee slides off the bed, the heels of his boots striking the ground. Brushes himself off. It’s not high afternoon yet, the evening event not for a few hours after that, and, with all they’ve learned, finding out what lies behind Inseong’s door in the nexus feels more important than ever.

Inseong’s trapped. Inseong’s trap. Half-truths, and hesitations, and the tesseract folds of the nexus thrusting them in and out of death.

“If you’re right about the ribbons,” Chanhee starts, then stops, the ramifications of his thoughts catching up with him, “then what about the other things? The hallucinations. How real do you think they could be?”

Jaeyoon shrugs, a small smile curving his lips but devoid of any joy. “As real as anything else.”

“Right,” Chanhee says, a little quicker. “Then. There’s another dream I never told you about.”

Jaeyoon frowns. “What’s that?”

“It was you, Youngbin, and Juho,” Chanhee says, pointing at each in turn. “I was pinned under a beam of some kind. Couldn’t breathe. The three of you came to help me, but after you lifted the beam off—I woke up before you could thrust it through my chest.”

Youngbin blinks, unsteady. His voice thick and wavering. “The three of us? I know it was our fakes, but…”

“Because you’re the ones whose ribbons aren’t visible,” Taeyang says. He gestures to Juho’s stomach, the salve still shining upon his skin. “If Chanhee didn’t know Juho was injured, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

Youngbin holds his head, red hair in tufts blooming between his white-knuckled fingers. “Hang on, I’m still… processing. You’re telling us this because you think the hallucinations could be linked to something else, right? Like—some kind of memory? I could—I could believe we know each other, weirder things have happened, but, I mean, I’d never—we’d never…”

“That would be the other thing,” Youngkyun says. “If we knew each other. If we were connected before we died. If those are memories, then they point to that much. But… killing each other…” He laughs nervously, shaking his head. “No way. Absolutely no way.”

Ignoring Youngkyun, Juho stares Chanhee down, his lips pursed. “You woke up?”

Crawled into his next dream, connected to a heart monitor. Listened to the beeping rhythm of the end of his life as Inseong, fake or real or everything in between, extended his hand.

“Yeah,” Chanhee lies, ducking his head under Juho’s scrutiny. “I did.”

▬▬▬

Against his better judgement, the weight of Seokwoo’s worried look, Chanhee returns to his room after their impromptu meeting. In the hopes of inducing a dream that might take him closer to that door, he crawls in between his messy sheets and closes his eyes.

The first dream is serene. Chanhee, ankle-deep in water, cold, trailing foam, prismatic rainbows forming off scattered bubbles beneath the sunlight. He takes in a deep breath and tastes—fresh, sweet air, and salt, and the remnants of ice-cream on his tongue, until he steps back, thick, soft sand shifting beneath his feet, and it isn’t anymore.

He grits his teeth, looks around: the same, narrow funnel corridor, marred with ash and debris and collapse, his feet trailing through dust. When he waves for a flame, it smoulders before it sparks, leaping to ravenous heights in his palm, a beacon to any fake that would find him.

Fine. If they find him, then maybe he’s on the right track.

The whispers absorb the silence; the faint pain crawling down his chest. The name that’s not quite his, Youngbin pleading with him even as he lifted the beam. Those voices that were unfamiliar; wrecked shards, held only together by tears. Fragments he heard with Inseong, gently interspersed with warmth amidst the cuts of uncertainty.

Real? Or a fabrication of happiness Chanhee hasn’t known since waking up here?

Quickening his pace, he turns the corner to face himself in the mirror, hair unruly, and a hoodie in each hand like he’s deciding which to wear. He blinks once blearily, then again, a double-take. His face looks so young, he hardly recognises himself.

“Chani.” Y̴͎͌̔͆̉ò̸̹̭͠u̵̢͛͆n̴̺̯͐̉g̷̲͍̠͒̋̋͐b̶̔̈̇̔ḯ̴̧̺͔̔n̴̲̙̒̋͐̌ sticks his head into the room, fingers curled around the doorframe. “We’re going to be late. Hurry up.”

“Yeah…” Chanhee finds himself saying, the words slow out of his mouth like syrup. “One more minute.”

Y̴͎͌̔͆̉ò̸̹̭͠u̵̢͛͆n̴̺̯͐̉g̷̲͍̠͒̋̋͐b̶̔̈̇̔ḯ̴̧̺͔̔n̴̲̙̒̋͐̌ steps further further into the room, a dumb, fond smile curling his lips. “The one on the left,” he says. “It’s cold out.”

Chanhee nods, slipping his arms into the jacket Y̴͎͌̔͆̉ò̸̹̭͠u̵̢͛͆n̴̺̯͐̉g̷̲͍̠͒̋̋͐b̶̔̈̇̔ḯ̴̧̺͔̔n̴̲̙̒̋͐̌ suggested and letting the other drop to the floor, a pile of discarded clothes pooling at his feet. As he does, Y̴͎͌̔͆̉ò̸̹̭͠u̵̢͛͆n̴̺̯͐̉g̷̲͍̠͒̋̋͐b̶̔̈̇̔ḯ̴̧̺͔̔n̴̲̙̒̋͐̌ steps further into the room, stopping just behind Chanhee.

Chanhee only catches a brief glimpse of Y̴͎͌̔͆̉ò̸̹̭͠u̵̢͛͆n̴̺̯͐̉g̷̲͍̠͒̋̋͐b̶̔̈̇̔ḯ̴̧̺͔̔n̴̲̙̒̋͐̌’s wicked grin before he tugs at the bunched fabric of Chanhee’s hood and drops it onto his head. “Perfect,” he says. “Now, come on, or we’ll really be late.”

Disoriented, Chanhee follows after him, unsurprised when the world flickers, a gloomy wall spanning Chanhee’s entire field of vision. Bare—no doors, no windows, wrapping around him like he’s a specimen trapped in a jar—save for a poster, pasted square in the centre of the wall. Faded.

Chanhee studies the figures in the poster, their faces dilute to near-unrecognisable versions of themselves, but Chanhee can still start to identify them, snatches of features: Jaeyoon’s rounded cheeks, Youngbin’s mismatching eyes, his own sunken gaze. As he examines the rest of the picture, though, an arm darts into his line of sight, blocking him off.

Chanhee stumbles as he’s bodily thrown back from the wall. The silhouette of a man swiftly replaces him, his motions jerky and explosive. Uncapping the red permanent marker in his hand, the man scrawls viciously over the poster, bludgeoning it with a bloodstain.

Then, his hand dragging down the paper with an audible squeak, he leans his forehead against the wall and sobs.

“Um,” Chanhee says. He doesn’t really mean for it to come out, but it does. The man lifts his head, and before Chanhee can apologise, or do anything, really, the man snags his fingers into the top of the poster and tears it from the wall.

Breathing raggedly, he whirls around on Chanhee, poster gripped between his fists and straining at the middle.

“What’s the point,” the man grits out, voice rough and strained. “He’s not here anymore, so what’s the point?”

With that, with one vicious tug, he rips the poster in two. His eye appearing in the crack; a bleeding wet socket.

▬▬▬

Inseong accompanies Chanhee to the soiree with a hand fluttering at the small of Chanhee’s back, chattering enthusiastically all the way downstairs. Chanhee searches his face for something: a shadow of anxiety over his bright eyes, an uncertain quirk to the corner of his mouth, but only finds the Inseong he’s always known, vivid and alluring and sweet. The man who kissed Chanhee gently and sung him to sleep, instead of the man possessed, reaching for Chanhee’s ribbon regardless of the pain.

In the grand, dazzling hall, rendered in strokes of champagne and gold, the first thing Inseong does is fetch them both drinks, crystal-clear and effervescent, tasting mildly of apple.

The second thing he does is note Seokwoo staring directly at them both, the empty space beside him, and laugh in a way Chanhee first identifies as self-deprecating, before he hears a current of sadness that Inseong is making no efforts to hide from him.

“I suppose Seokwoo still isn’t too fond of me,” Inseong muses, distant.

Chanhee looks up at Inseong in disbelief. “You hurt him,” he says, a quiet edge to his tone. “He’s not getting better.”

Inseong meets Chanhee’s gaze, unfiltered hurt etched into his eyes. “If Seokwoo had—”

“Stayed still? Didn’t resist?” Chanhee deadpans, and Inseong fidgets, lost and hurt and betrayed. “You didn’t feel guilty about it, either.”

Inseong sighs. “I can’t make you understand, Chanhee, but—”

“—have you tried?” Chanhee interrupts, and Inseong sighs again, louder this time.

“—but I don’t want to fight,” he says, hands raised in appeasement.

Chanhee scoffs, taking a step back, the distance between them stretching to a point of physical discomfort, like Chanhee is a tree trying to uproot itself. “So, you’re not different than the fakes,” he mutters, and Inseong’s eyes widen, stricken.

“Chanhee—”

“Were you pretending about Juho?”

“No.” Distraught, Inseong lurches off-kilter in an effort to reach for Chanhee’s hands. “I wouldn’t—I can’t control—”

All this time, the guests have been migrating around them, keeping a perfect radius from Inseong, from him, like a bubble, a chamber for the two of them to be kept in.

Inseong stares at him, helpless, chest heaving with his breath. Like cannon-fire, the guests turn away so as not to see the corners of his lips wilt. “But you don’t,” he says, small, “believe me.”

\

Chanhee exhales, and, as he does, the elastic band in his brain snaps back into place. “I do,” he mumbles, maybe against his better judgement, but the words escape his lips easily, slotting into the air like they belong there. “Anyway. Don’t you have guests to tend to?”

Inseong smiles at him, worn and weary. “I’m all yours tonight,” he says, and Chanhee knows that won’t go over well with Seokwoo, but…

“Let’s go sit down,” he says.

And he’s right. Seokwoo looks less than pleased when Inseong takes the free chair between Chanhee and Jaeyoon, like an extra wheel on a carriage. But conversation keeps up, the night goes on, and, for once, the world remains bright amidst the stillness.

No dreaming. Just fizzy apple soda, a delectable banquet—

—and the sound of glass crashing to the floor as someone collides with a server, sending their tray plunging to the ground.

Staff hurry to the spot to clean up, ushering him away, and as he’s guided into the centre of the room, Chanhee gets a closer look. Military brocaded jacket, startled expression, and a beribboned eye-patch, slung over his left eye.

He looks around, lost, before he pins his gaze to Inseong. Marches over, only to stop just short of the table, face fluctuating through hundreds of different emotions before settling on something brittle and charged. “You—you’re Inseong, right?”

Inseong’s eyes widen. He rises slowly to his feet, lips forming around a word, “Sanghyu—” and cut off, by the man’s hand striking sharply into his cheek.

Inseong’s head turns with the vicious force. He staggers back, rattling the table, a hand clutching his injured cheek. Lip broken, beading scarlet as blood runs in stripes down his chin and jaw.

“Sanghyuk,” he says again, ground out.

The man, Sanghyuk, looks down at his hand then back up at Inseong, singular eye frozen. Not even seeming to notice, rigid, delayed as two of the staff approach him from the side.

“Sanghyuk—” Inseong lunges for him with a blood-streaked hand, too late, as the staff throw him back into a nearby table.

He crashes with sickening force, chairs rocking violently around him, but while he clutches his head, horrified and dazed, the guests just down at him with mild, curious expressions.

Seokwoo is the first up out of his seat, but Inseong seizes his arm before he can reach Sanghyuk’s side.

“What?” Seokwoo wrenches his arm in Inseong’s grip, but Inseong ignores him, only focused on the eyes of the two staff before him.

“Stop,” he murmurs, so soft, so authoritative, that its echo resonates in Chanhee’s core, unfurling in a pool of warmth. “I’m retiring to my room for tonight. Please, Dr. Kim, take care of Sanghyuk for me.”

Seokwoo nods, lips flattened. Rubbing his arm when Inseong releases it.

A hush falls over the hall, carpeting Inseong’s wake as he stalks out of the room. What follows:

“He knew Inseong’s name,” Taeyang says.

“The staff stopped like that.” Youngkyun snaps his fingers.

“Sanghyuk?” Seokwoo calls, and, from the floor, Sanghyuk groans.

All as the guests rise from their chairs, tucking them beneath tables in perfect unison. As the staff resume working, scattering into formation across the hall. As they seem to form a swarm, barricading every unmanned spot, watching every exit.

As it dawns on Chanhee, on all of them, that Inseong himself may not be hunting them, but everyone else is.

Chapter Text

THE GUESTS AND STAFF freeze. As if the echo of Inseong’s quiet command is still reverberating throughout the hall in invisible ripples, permeating every surface, every cell, every fibre. Still, like a held breath, before the rigidity of their joints fails, and the return to their roles, the status-quo performance, as though nothing ever happened.

After checking Sanghyuk’s head, Seokwoo offers him a hand up, which he takes, swaying a little as climbs to his feet. Sanghyuk surveys the floor, their table, Seokwoo’s face, and a low moan cuts out of him as he presses a hand to his forehead.

“Sanghyuk—” Seokwoo says worriedly, and Sanghyuk hisses through his teeth. “It doesn’t look bad, but if you want me to give you a proper checkup—”

“No.” Sanghyuk drags a hand down his face, briefly disturbing his eyepatch. “It’s not—I don’t understand this place. Where am I?”

Chanhee and Seokwoo exchange glances. Sanghyuk, emotional and shaken and distressed, doesn’t exactly seem to be in the place where he could bear the truth, but—

“The afterlife,” Youngbin says. He pushes himself up from the table with one hand, expression solemn, yet softened by sympathy. “I, um. I’m not sure how to say it in a gentle way, but you’re dead. Just like us.”

Sanghyuk’s pupil quivers in the rich darkness of his eye, tears rising thick on its surface. “No way,” he chokes. The first tear slips, traces a shining line down his cheek, coats his wet, quivering mouth. Another, and he wipes them away with a fierce hand. “No way. Not me too. I’m not dead.”

His voice cracks.

Somewhere, along the line, they all became so desensitised to this mansion, the nexus, the terror, that being dead just seemed like another domino, another fact to contend with. Seeing Sanghyuk like this now reminds Chanhee that it’s more than that. It’s something they lost, and Sanghyuk’s reaction is raw. Real. Something to hold onto.

Youngkyun gets up to give Sanghyuk a handkerchief, and when Sanghyuk snatches it from him, his fingers tremble. Sanghyuk stares down at it with such intensity that even his single eye could scorch through the silken fabric.

“I don’t understand it,” he says, blitzed, jaw quaking with the effort. “When I look at you all, I get so—I’m so angry. I’m so angry.”

Jaeyoon’s face softens. He gets up to rub rhythmic circles into Sanghyuk’s back. “Why did you slap Inseong?” he asks quietly, and Sanghyuk’s head snaps up at the question, glossy and red-blotched and wrecked.

“You mean you don’t—” Jaeyoon silently shakes his head, and Sanghyuk gnashes his teeth, furious, and so, so sad. “You don’t feel it? When I look at him, he makes me—angrier than anyone.”

“But, are you angry?” Youngbin asks.

Sanghyuk’s face crumples. “I don’t know,” he gasps out, a wretched sound. “I’m so—and it’s so easy—and when I look at you all, and you don’t even recognise me, and it’s like I’m the only one, all over again, but I don’t even know what that…” His hand jumps to his head again, knotting in pain, and Seokwoo exhales.

“This is no good. You’re just going to get a headache.” Weary, Seokwoo passes a hand back through his hair. “We should continue this conversation when we can, but not now. I’ll… do you have a room?”

Sanghyuk sniffs. “Don’t think so.”

“Take him to mine,” Chanhee offers, as Seokwoo shoots him a puzzled look.

Jaeyoon, his hand smoothing the back of Sanghyuk’s jacket, cocks his head. “Inseong? Are you going to find answers?”

“Whatever answers find me,” Chanhee says. There’s every chance Inseong won’t say a word, distract Chanhee’s attention. Ask for the price of Chanhee’s ribbon to answer any of his questions, because there is something he is terrified of, and Chanhee saw it when Sanghyuk said his name.

“Can’t it wait? If Sanghyuk has more to tell us…” Seokwoo trails off.

Chanhee gestures at the hall. Beyond the wash of lights and muted colours, harsh pockets of black encroach upon the corners, like spiders dripping their webs down the walls. “It’s already flickering.”

Seokwoo presses his lips together, clearly disapproving, but Chanhee already knows he won’t say anything else. Better the villain he knows, Chanhee supposes.

The flickering continues as Chanhee escapes the rigid stagnancy of the hall, untextured black tiles seeming to fade in and out of his vision, multiplying the further up he goes. By the time he reaches the third floor, whole subsections of the hallway are barricaded by an impassable, oily darkness. Inviting Chanhee with open arms.

The door with Inseong’s name on it, slipping through Chanhee’s fingers. The secrets of the nexus that permeate everything.

The darkness thickens as it grows, expanding over the estate, falling over the staircase like ebony piano keys. Glimpses and flashes of sawdust and ash, a burnt-out labyrinth.

Finally, Chanhee reaches Inseong’s suite and raps twice on the door. “It’s me,” he says, but only silence greets him, hanging heavy in the air. Frustrated, Chanhee wraps his hand around the door-handle and shoves his way inside.

The unfiltered mess of Inseong’s suite is sprayed with a cloak of hazy shadow, diffused only by the soft, amber burn of lanterns hanging from the walls, pooling honey light framing the edges of strewn clothing and littered trinkets, the intricate filigree of his bedposts, the churning of his unmade bed. The plush fabric of his armchair, gold studding the buttons, the delicate fairy-stitching, and Inseong’s face in profile: the soft sweep of his hair and the line of his nose and the downward turn of his bloodied mouth, pressed into his knuckles.

His eyes are dull, listless, fixed upon the skirting board but not seeming to see anything at all. Unmoving, even when Chanhee steps deeper into the room, his shadow pouring out across the faintly-lit floors like an ink spill, and—

He has never seen Inseong like this. Unravelled, unmade, hair messy and face clear. Pyjama shirt so hastily worn the buttons don’t reach his clavicle, fabric twisting around his abdomen.

“I lied to you,” he murmurs, before Chanhee can wander any closer. The words like a binding spell, rooting him in place, or perhaps more like a wall, a glass barricade, so Chanhee can study Inseong in all his ruined glory, but cannot come close enough to touch. The question is—who is being kept safe from who?

“About what?” Chanhee presses, and Inseong’s lips curl downwards, cutting deep into his cheeks.

“I told you there was nothing outside this estate. If you tried to leave, there would be nothing. But that isn’t true.” His eyelids flutter, ghosting across the hollows of his eyes. “There’s a small farming village, south of the estate. Beyond the fog. It has an operating train line, so you could go—anywhere.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Chanhee asks. Another step. “Do you think I’ll leave, right now, if you do? Because I won’t.”

“You don’t want to stay,” Inseong says. Still not meeting Chanhee’s gaze.

“I also don’t believe you.”

Inseong sighs. “Why are you here, Chanhee?”

“Sanghyuk recognised you. And you recognised him, just like Juho in the nexus.”

Inseong smiles, frail and wrung. “So, you thought you would come and get answers out of me.”

“Why does he know you? If we all knew each other before we died, then—” The words die in Chanhee’s throat as Inseong pushes to his feet, barging past Chanhee despite the space all around them, like the suffocating air surrounds the outline of their bodies, forcing them together like toys in a box. “Inseong, I’m trying to understand you.”

Inseong freezes when Chanhee’s hand makes contact, wrapping around his forearm like a python. “I know,” he says in a small voice.

“Then, let me.”

Inseong stiffens. “Chanhee…”

“I could find out,” Chanhee bites out, a desperate bid, his hand tightening around Inseong’s arm, shirt-sleeve bunching in his grasp. Inseong’s skin, pink and mottled underneath. If Chanhee kept going, he could promise a bruise by morning, and it’d be a relief to know that, if it came down to it, Chanhee would be able to hurt him at all. “That door. In the nexus, with your name on it. If I just went there—”

With frightening speed, Inseong wrenches his arm out of Chanhee’s grasp, causing Chanhee to lurch forward, the floor fading to air beneath his feet.

“Get out,” Inseong whispers. Maybe it’s a trick of the light, but darkness devours the whites of his eyes, cosmic voids.

And Chanhee wonders if he’s made a terrible mistake. “Inseong—”

“Get out,” Inseong repeats, and despite his eerie calm, there’s a furious grind to his teeth. “Or I’ll have someone escort you out.”

Swallowing, Chanhee nods, backing up, heels striking discordant notes against the marble flooring. At the door, he spares one final glance at Inseong: lower lip pulled up beneath his teeth, fresh blood on his chin. Hand rubbing the space where Chanhee held him; hurt, but it doesn’t feel nearly as gratifying as Chanhee expected.

Outside, the door to Inseong’s suite is guarded by two staff that weren’t there before, laser-eyes following Chanhee’s every motion, every breath, and the flickering is worse than before. Chanhee hurries through nightmares like lightning, too quick for him to process but dizzying all the same, festering in his subconscious long before he can eject them from his system.

He reaches his room in an eternity, no time at all, crashes his body weight against the door. Realises too late when it opens, revealing the lit lanterns and drawn curtains, that it’s already occupied.

Sanghyuk pushes himself up on his elbows to blink confusedly at Chanhee. “I’m not giving you your room back. I was asleep.”

“No, I wasn’t gonna…” The shock of Sanghyuk’s reaction cuts into Chanhee’s panic, and he shakes his head free, heart slowing to a crawl beneath his palm. “Uh. Just here to get clothes.”

“Suit yourself.” Sanghyuk flops back, denting the covers. He’s stripped himself free of his military jacket and finery, softer without his outer shell. “But it’s a big bed. I don’t mind sharing.”

Chanhee falters, crouched to sift through the pyjamas he left on the floor just hours before. “I don’t even know you.”

Sanghyuk laughs at that, but the happiness in it is short-lived. “You definitely do. Somehow.”

“If neither of us remember, then does that really count?” Chanhee wonders if Seokwoo’s still awake; he could probably just sleep there, right? If not, Youngkyun definitely wouldn't mind.

“Well, we might remember,” Sanghyuk retorts childishly, toying with the ribbon of his eyepatch, and—Chanhee belatedly realises that if Sanghyuk still has his eyepatch on, then he can’t have been sleeping at all. “C’mon, lie down.”

Curiosity getting the better of him, Chanhee drops his clothes and approaches the bed, his knees sinking into the mattress. “Can I see underneath?”

Sanghyuk’s lip curls upward; he pats the empty space on the bed beside him. “If you show me yours. That’s the rule, right?”

Maybe Chanhee should be desensitised to it. Maybe he shouldn't feel anything at all. But, each time he exposes his ribbon, his heart, his skin blooms with feeling, a firework of sensation against his skin. Bundled nerves staking their last claim on life, memorialising the place where he died, tying him to the person he used to be, doesn't remember. The—vulnerability, the intimacy. In some ways, it's all he's had since waking up, a constant, a connection. If it wasn't there, would he be anything at all?

But, he nods, lying down, and Sanghyuk's hand wastes no time in tracing across his skin, roaming over his chest. Eye mesmerisingly dark, with a hunger so ardent Chanhee can feel it through Sanghyuk's fingertips, his fixated gaze, and Jaeyoon's words flash through Chanhee's mind: you're the one who keeps dragging me in. That hypnotic effect… That’s what you have, on me.

Inseong, voice midnight-soft, just grazing the air between them: I don’t have anything tying me to you.

Chanhee reaches for Sanghyuk’s face, skating the ribbon holding his eyepatch together, just this side of—and Sanghyuk’s hand evacuates Chanhee's abdomen, leaving the seizing weight of its absence, to reach around the back of his own head. Chanhee’s breath hitches as Sanghyuk's eyepatch falls free, slipping past his cheek, and his eye flutters open, the socket webbed in black silk.

Sanghyuk's fake, scourging their faces in bloody marker stains. A glimpse of Inseong’s smiling face, like the air was being squeezed out of his lungs, when Chanhee brought it up.

Frightened. Chanhee finally knows how to break him.

▬▬▬

Chanhee wakes up before dawn, the other side of the bed cool beneath his fingertips. After a fitful sleep, it takes a moment for his memories to wind back: his argument with Inseong, sleeping next to Sanghyuk, the weight of dark dreams, festering like fog on his subconscious.

Sanghyuk is gone, his eyepatch absent from the bedside table, but his jacket remains hung from the top drawer of Chanhee’s dresser, so that its hem barely skims the floor.

Chanhee skips dressing, only pulling on his stockings and boots, and hurries out of the door. The hallway is gaping and vacant, braziers burnt-out over the course of the night and reduced to embers.

The staff that used to guard Juho’s door have been dismissed, by Seokwoo’s insistence, and it seems Inseong hasn’t done anything to override his word. Chanhee knocks twice, his hand arched around the door-handle, but the voice that invites him in isn’t Juho’s, but Sanghyuk’s.

Chanhee gently clicks the door shut behind him. Unlike everywhere else in the mansion, Juho’s room is turned up for the day, down to the water overflowing in the pitchers and glasses. Outside, the sky is a chasm of faint light, a handful of silver coins thrown across fading darkness, and the curtains stir in the light breeze.

Juho returns from his attached bathroom, Seokwoo and Sanghyuk bearing his weight on each of his flanks. He’s still frail, sanded sharp, but when Sanghyuk makes him laugh, Juho’s eyes are bright, lucid, and there’s colour in his cheeks for the first time in days. Seokwoo helps him into bed, reattaching him to his drip, and Juho pulls his covers back up around his waist.

Perched on the edge of the bed, Sanghyuk rubs Juho’s thigh through the duvet, other hand free to wave jauntily at Chanhee. “Morning! I didn’t wake you, right?”

“Don’t think so. Maybe.” Chanhee crosses his legs on the chilled floor. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“What, you think I can’t get visitors other than you?” Juho mutters, flat against his pillow.

“With that personality…” Chanhee trails off, and Sanghyuk laughs.

“I came to keep him company—”

Juho coughs. “Annoy me.”

“Yeah, that.” Sanghyuk waves him off. “Since I wanted to see him. Actually, though, I think—talking might’ve jogged my memory. A bit. I don’t know.” His fingers knit uneasily in the covers.

Seokwoo, in the middle of searching for a particular tincture, pauses, his head tilting towards the bed. “I can get the others. We don’t have long until the staff wake up.”

He darts past Chanhee towards the door, and Sanghyuk gets up to follow, except instead of chasing Seokwoo, he reaches down to grab Chanhee by the elbow. Chanhee blinks as Sanghyuk tugs him to his feet like a ragdoll.

“It was something Juho said,” Sanghyuk says, quickly, quietly, just skirting Juho’s earshot.

Chanhee knows this because Juho says, “Can you guys talk about me outside? It’s not like I can leave the room,” right afterwards, with an absence of both bite and suspicion.

“Did he…” Chanhee hooks his lip into his mouth, unsure of how to put it. “Go dark?”

“Yeah, yeah, something like that,” Sanghyuk murmurs, pressing two fingers into his temple. “I—”

“You should wait until everyone else gets here,” Chanhee cautions, looking around. The sun has yet to break the horizon, and he knows the staff are nothing if not punctual, he knows, but—the sour note he left Inseong on means even that faint sliver of safety feels like desperation.

“Right.” Sanghyuk ruffles his floppy hair as he returns to Juho’s side like a magnet, and Chanhee realises that, despite everything Sanghyuk’s arrival has brought, Juho finally looks like he has hope.

The others file in, one after the other, Youngkyun immediately making a beeline to squat down beside Chanhee and punch his shoulder. “Thought you slept with Inseong.”

Heat crawls onto Chanhee’s cheeks. “No. Wanted space.”

Youngkyun hums, shooting a glance at Sanghyuk. “Interesting definition of space.”

Chanhee groans. “Shut up.”

“Inseong didn’t—”

“We argued.”

Youngkyun thinks about this. He opens his mouth to reply, but before he can, the last person—Youngbin—quietly enters the room and clicks the door shut behind him. Much like everyone else, he seems to be straight out of bed: pyjamas crumpled, red hair mussed, lazy eyes still blinking away the residuals of sleep.

He stifles a yawn with one hand and waves languidly with the other. “I assume this is so we don’t get overheard?”

Taeyang, elbows propped on the dresser, drops his chin into his hands like a flower. “They’re listening. Or worse.”

“They’ll listen to anything Inseong says,” Jaeyoon murmurs, and Taeyang looks at him, mouth curved in spite of himself.

“The worse in question.”

Seokwoo takes a last glance at the window. “We’re running out of time. What did you remember, Sanghyuk?”

“Just…” Sanghyuk’s gaze sweeps across each of them, and moving in a cyclical, conjuring gesture. “Nostalgia for this—being together, but then… There was so much pain. I could feel—like we were close, we were trying to prove something, but then so far apart that I—” Gritting his teeth, he scrubs at his eye. Wetness gathers and gleams on his palm. “We have to stay together this time. We have to—or I… get this feeling, like I can’t blink, or…”

Frustrated, he gets up to pace the room, then stops short at the window. The first true light of dawn embroiders the distant hills of the estate in gold thread. “Leave,” he finishes, in an entirely different tone to before. Hard, urgent. Sniffing hard, Sanghyuk stabs his index finger at the glass. “Outside the estate, it’s… I remember—thatched rooves, I think, and cows. Pens of cows. And smoke, I think. Maybe steam.”

Chanhee’s mouth dries. “Like a train.”

Sanghyuk half-turns. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Outside the estate? Really?” Youngbin’s eyebrows draw together. “But there’s nothing there. Even when we tried to go—”

Chanhee drags a hand down his face. “Because Inseong was telling the truth.”

“What are you talking about?” Jaeyoon frowns. “I thought he said there was nothing out there.”

“No, he—” Chanhee heaves a sigh. “He told me he lied about that. That there was a small farming village outside of the estate that was connected to a railway line. I assumed he was lying again.”

Seokwoo wets his lips. “And, now we know he’s not. So, what do we do?”

“There’s only one thing we can do,” Youngkyun says, leaning his arm over his bent knees. “We take the opportunity. Even if it’s a trap. I say, better a doomed idea than no idea at all. If there’s something out there, then we need to know. We need to leave.”

“I don’t think I have the stomach for leaving,” Juho says, his face completely straight. Jaeyoon laughs with him, but on a delay, and Juho huffs. “That doesn’t mean I won’t try.”

Taeyang shakes his head, equal parts disapproving and crestfallen. “It’s almost definitely a trap. If he said that, doesn’t that just mean he has some other way of being certain we won’t leave?”

Of course. What else would Inseong be so afraid of?

“Right…” Chanhee breathes out. “So, we need to take it away from him.”

Youngbin faces him with wide eyes. “What does that—”

“It means I won’t be able to come with you,” Chanhee says. Distress preys openly on Sanghyuk’s face, and Seokwoo immediately opens his mouth to protest, but Chanhee shakes his head. “I mean, not right away. I need to find out what’s behind that door in the nexus. If it’s a trump card, then I can stop it.” He turns to Sanghyuk. “So we can be together.”

“You’re not immune to him, Chanhee,” Youngkyun says. “You never were. Even if you think so.”

Chanhee almost laughs. Is that what he thought? It feels familiar, somehow, like all this time he was floating on the possibility, deluding himself from the feeling of falling. Like when Jaeyoon called him hypnotic, and Chanhee wondered if that stretched to Inseong too.

Get out, Inseong had said, and maybe he meant it, more than his room, his suite. His mansion, the orbit of his universe; Chanhee a toy-soldier chess piece that he no longer wanted to keep.

Across the room, at Juho’s bedside, Jaeyoon thumbs at the arm of his chair, gaze distant. Exhaling, he tips his head back, then his body weight, the chair rising in halves from the ground. “Part of me… just doesn’t want to leave him,” he confesses, scarcely a murmur, but it commands the room all the same.

“Jaeyoon…” Youngbin runs a hand through his hair, distressing the red. Light bounces off the strands like crackling flames. The sun. They’re running out of time.

“Youngbin,” Jaeyoon echoes, tone so sweet it almost feels out of place. A smile edges at the corners of his mouth, dimples digging into his cheeks. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll stay with him. Distract him. So, you all can do what you need to do.”

“Break him,” Chanhee mutters. As much to himself as anyone else in the room; maybe to the staff, to Inseong himself, if he’s listening. “That’s… that’s what we need to do.”

Seokwoo searches Chanhee’s face, and Chanhee wonders what he’ll find, mostly because he isn’t sure himself. Desperation? Defeat? Anything at all?

But then Juho presses his lips together and nods, and Youngkyun presses his arm against Chanhee’s, and Taeyang’s mouth coils in an approving grin.

Sanghyuk peers at Chanhee, equal parts concerned and proud. “That’s easy,” he says.

With that, Jaeyoon reaches behind him, unspooling the long tail of his ribbon across his fingers. Nodding silently, Youngbin gestures to his leg, the black faintly visible through his trousers. Youngkyun brandishes his wrist as Sanghyuk thumbs the strap of his eyepatch, as Seokwoo peels back his thick choker to reveal a glimpse of the severed skin underneath. Juho’s hand rests on his stomach, rising and falling. Chanhee presses his hand to his chest.

His ribbon has saved him, more than once. With Taeyang, with Youngbin. Sought out solidarity among crushing dreams. Targets, death warrants, symbols, everything more and less and in between.

I’m different to all of you. Chanhee slips his hand into his shirt, heart racing under the graze of his fingertips. I don’t have anything tying me to you.

Chanhee’s ribbon is saving him, even now.

So, what’s saving Inseong?

Chapter Text

THIS TIME, WHEN YOUNGKYUN asks Chanhee to dance, Chanhee accepts his offer. Falls into step with him against an angelic symphony, as the firelight blurs above him, the staff move in their manufactured paths, and the sunset outside is the same as ever. Smiling, wide and a little mischievous, Youngkyun dips his head forth so his sheep curls graze against the side of Chanhee’s head, mask the rapid-fire of his lips. “Inseong’s dancing with Jaeyoon.”

“Let’s go,” Chanhee says, pulling at Youngkyun though he’s not leading.

Youngkyun laughs. “Jealous?” and if they weren’t being listened to, Chanhee’s not sure what he would answer.

But, they are, and so he nods, closing his eyes against the swell of the music, perfumed heat and cologne effervescing in the air. Following the dancers, the way they thread and unspool across the glossy floor, it isn’t long before Jaeyoon and Inseong are within earshot, within reach. Chanhee could snag Inseong’s wrist in his fingers, take in blown-wide eyes and the shocked curl to Inseong’s mouth, but instead he traces down Youngkyun’s ribbons, presses his thumb to the fluttering rhythm of Youngkyun’s pulse, and listens close.

“Where is Sanghyuk?” Inseong asks, looking around. Chanhee pretends not to notice when Inseong’s gaze scorches the side of his face, burning right through as if he’s invisible. “I thought I would see him tonight.”

Jaeyoon shakes his head, apologetic. “We… couldn’t convince him to come. After…”

“I think I should go and see him,” Inseong murmurs. Ever the doting host. Does he ever worry about the end? “I’m ashamed of how last night ended.”

“Inseong…”

At that moment, the music rises. Youngkyun spins Chanhee in time so that he doesn’t catch whatever Jaeyoon does to make Inseong step out of his embrace. Jaeyoon reaches for his hand before he can leave.

“At least let me come with you,” he murmurs. Inseong’s mouth curves, too slow to veil the surprise settling soft on his features.

“Thank you,” he replies.

The song changes as they leave, a slower piece. Chanhee switches partners from Youngkyun to Youngbin, the latter whose warm concern can’t be understated. “How are you going to find it?” he questions, voice low, even as his hands fall naturally to Chanhee's waist. In turn, Chanhee tightens his grip on Youngbin's shoulders; for anyone watching too closely, he wants to seem perfectly in sync, focused only on the steps mapped out in front of him.

Right now, Seokwoo must be preparing for him and Juho to leave undetected, with scarcely more than what it’ll take to make sure Juho will survive the journey. There might not be staff posted outside the door anymore, but they have to assume that eyes are everywhere, that each one reports to Inseong and is out for blood. For all intents and purposes, the dolls populating the grand hall are no different to the fakes wearing their faces.

“Gonna find the real room,” Chanhee replies, a breath, though it’ll be easier said than done. The labyrinth Chanhee remembers resembles no part of the mansion he’s ever seen, but, maybe…

Distracted, Chanhee doesn’t notice they’re approaching the banquet area until he takes a step back, his leg hooking around someone else’s, and a feminine shriek pierces the air.

He only has a split second to take in Lucy’s look of horror before, for the second time, icy-cold liquid pours down his shirt and blooms uncomfortably on the fabric.

Her tray crashes to the floor, a dozen filled glasses falling with it. A smeared puddle of glass and honey-wine gaping at their feet.

“I’m so sorry.” Her eyes flit around the room, landing on no one in particular. “I’ll clean it up, I will. Oh, but, of course, your clothes…”

“I have a handkerchief.” Taeyang disentangles himself from Youngkyun and strides forward, his expression a careful, blank mask. Brandishing the handkerchief, he presses it to Chanhee’s chest. “Go and clean yourself up,” he says, equal parts gentle and deliberate. Chanhee interprets his meaning immediately.

Lucy looks at Chanhee anxiously. “I can fetch you some clean clothes, Mr. Kang.”

“No need,” Taeyang interrupts, before Chanhee can say anything. “The glass needs to be cleaned up first. What if someone steps in it?”

He drops, knee-first in the liquid, and Lucy scrambles to join him, terror pitching her words. “No, no, you absolutely cannot help me, Mr. Kim will—” Wide-eyed, she bites herself off, shoving a hand to her mouth.

As the stares of a thousand guests weigh down upon her, bodies turning like ripples in still water.

“Will what?” Taeyang prompts softly. Chanhee picks this moment to leave, passing through the crowd like water, undetected and unmissed. Sparing one last glance at the spectacle dominating the hall, he notices a—strangeness overtake Lucy’s pinprick gaze.

She shakes her head fiercely, pins falling loose, then stops. A clumsy smile unfurls across her mouth. “It’s unbecoming for one of his guests to do this,” she says, in a tone alien to what it was before, as if the fear she felt just moments ago has been erased.

Reset.

Chanhee ducks out of the hall and escapes into the corridor, palms clammy with tension. He wipes them on the handkerchief to no avail, moving quickly, carefully, but—the ceilings are high and bright, liquid gold applied to the walls like a balm. Not even the barest glimpse of a shadow across the skirting boards, or spilling at his feet.

For the first time, he’s desperate, and there isn’t a flicker in sight.

Why? Why now?

Chanhee bolts up the first flight of stairs, legs burning, wet fabric strangling his neck. Even the moonlight pours like the sun, candescent, lingering in every corner, flowing across the wooden floor like fresh, glossy icing.

His door is shut. As planned. Inseong and Jaeyoon and Sanghyuk somewhere behind it, breaking or being broken, and every time Chanhee blinks, he catches a glimpse of what that might look like.

An injection, lead and adrenaline, body moving slower as the world turns faster. He doesn’t remember the second floor, but he remembers the third, the smoke from the braziers, the light dancing through the window-glass. His shadow, cut out of the floor with jagged scissors, not quite matching the way he blitzes forward, hardly aware of his feet striking the floor, only of the air pushing against his shins, his arms, lacking in his lungs and acid in his chest.

But, when Chanhee reaches the fourth floor, an indisputable feeling of wrongness overrides all else. The hallway to Inseong’s suite slightly askew, the rug a few centimetres off-centre. It pervades Chanhee’s consciousness like low-rolling smoke.

Unlike just nights before, Inseong’s room is vulnerable, unguarded. The door opens easily under Chanhee’s hand. Chanhee closes his eyes as he passes through the doorway, hears Inseong first—get out, get out—before the silence etches itself in like a shadow.

Inseong’s suite, without Inseong, and yet the presence of him is undeniable. His cologne, faintly perfuming the air. His clothes, arranged neatly in the wardrobe and peeking out of the drawers. Fresh flowers in vases scattered around the room and paintings on the walls. Chanhee breathes shallowly at first and then deeply, takes him in down to the cells.

Only then does the wrongness refocus itself, and it occurs to Chanhee that that is the extent of Inseong’s personal effects. Pressed suits and makeup; jewellery and perfume. Everything that makes up the image of Inseong, the ideal. The top layers of his portrait, like painting in thick oil over glass, every stroke visible underneath.

Transparency. The parties, the dolls. If this is a performance, then where does it end?

Chanhee scans the room, heart in his throat, for something, anything, that might—

In his haste, his heel strikes a trailing corner of duvet from the unmade bed and he stumbles, toppling back onto the bed, the gentle arms of Inseong’s soft covers welcoming him home. He found himself cradled in these sheets. Laid his head with Inseong’s on those pillows. Sought peace under this canopy, pink shimmering mesh like a candy sky, stretched taut over the bedposts and draped lavishly over the sides and back.

When he’s here, the world shrinks; Inseong, four walls, rose-tinted memories, the cloudy, glittering haze of the world outside.

Chanhee sits bolt upright.

Which is why he never noticed it before. On his knees, he scrambles across the duvets, the pillows, knees slamming against the ornate headboard as he presses his hand to the wall.

Tracing the thin outline of a door through blushing gauze.

This bed saw the rawest, weakest parts of Chanhee, while protecting all of Inseong’s.

Throwing himself off the bed, Chanhee lunges for the narrow crevice between the wall and headboard. There’s a surprising amount of space, and the door opens inwards, giving against Chanhee’s weight.

The wrongness reveals itself, rearing its head. Behind this door, Inseong’s name slashed across the wood, is not the mansion, not the nexus, but somewhere both and in-between.

The room that greets Chanhee is small, dark, and bare, the ceiling so low that Chanhee can almost touch it. Nondescript, except for the long, rectangular coffin absorbing the breadth of the room, cloaked in a ravenous layer of dust.

Chanhee creeps forward, the wood-panel flooring settling eerily beneath him, and curves his fingers under the lid, gouging imprints of his hands out of the grime. Prying the lid from its hibernation, Chanhee widens his stance, bracing the full impact of his strength against the coffin.

The lid drags across the base with a resentful rasp, a heavy, pungent scent emanating from within. Ashy and stagnant, coating his lungs like cinder-smoke.

And there he lies. His posture too straight, too stiff. His suit unrumpled, his hair neat; untouched, unsmiling. His expression solidly, terrifically blank. In jagged pieces: a hand, a knee, emaciated fragments of his face and abdomen. Abyssal chasms, black silk, spanning the spaces between, sewn up like patchwork.

The secret Inseong was keeping. The truth behind the door.

His Inseong, but not his. One that no amount of kisses and touches and lullabies would ever awaken.

Chanhee’s hand tremors. Uncontrollable, even as he lifts it to trace the side of Inseong’s face. Pale, and so, so still, cool against the tips of Chanhee’s fingers Sweeps the rise of Inseong’s cheek, the hollow of his neck, ribbon and skin indiscriminately. Nothing in the cavity of his chest, ribcage guarding silence and longing.

Chanhee hoists himself up onto the side of the coffin, a taboo to reach ever-closer. Finds Inseong’s eyeball through the silk, soft, at first, but then rugged and thick like scar-tissue. Leans forward, forehead to forehead, no heat, no presence of warm breath to flay Chanhee’s lips.

Eventually, as they are so connected Chanhee is wondering how not to fall apart, his hand strays to Inseong’s: his final clasp, his promise. As something sounds behind him: creaking, shuffling. The shuddering hoarseness of breath.

Inseong. Chanhee notices his face first, twisted in an expression of pain, the only exception to how whole and hale he looks, unchanged. Second: the leg he drags behind him in juddering movements, a crimson bullet-hole carved out of his thigh.

And finally, the shred of black ribbon, gripped firmly in his hand like a lifeline.

Jaeyoon.

Chanhee flings himself off the side of the coffin, the ground coming up to knock the wind out of his lungs, impact jarring up through his bones. Inseong comes to stand over him; distance in his gaze, a volatile quiver to his jaw.

“You didn’t have to do this,” he whispers, eyes unfocused pinpricks, seeming to land anywhere but Chanhee’s face. “You didn’t have to come here.”

Chanhee shoves himself backward, though, try as he might, he can’t seem to escape the all-consuming darkness of Inseong’s shadow. “What did you do to Jaeyoon?”

“What I had to do. I've only ever—” Inseong cuts himself off, gnashing his teeth. “You wouldn't understand it.”

Chanhee’s head snaps up to his, stung. “I tried,” he counters, gravel in his throat, and Inseong laughs, a harsh, humourless sound.

Jerks his fist up to his face, Jaeyoon’s ribbon fluttering with the motion. “But, you still look at this and think I’m a monster,” he says. In the darkness of the room, his eyes burn brightly, tear-sharp and spilling over. Gestures, viciously in the direction of the coffin. “When you look at that, what do you see?”

“What am I meant to say? I see you,” Chanhee snaps, and, around them, the world flickers. “And maybe you are a monster.”

Inseong flinches, struck. Tears falling like rainfall now, and Chanhee wonders—at what point did he break? Right now? With Jaeyoon? Or was he already broken, the day they met, glass shards under his skin instead of flesh and bone?

“Really?” Inseong exhales, a sound cleaved. Takes a slow, deliberate step forward, tears shining down his throat now, feeding into the collar of his jacket. He stops short of Chanhee’s legs, sprawled and frozen stiff on the bare floor. “Do you really think I’m a monster?”

Chanhee stares up at him. “Yeah,” he breathes, the cursed word hardly out of his lips before Inseong’s hand shoots down like a missile to pin the fabric around Chanhee’s throat.

Chanhee welcomes the pain of the wall crushing against his spine as Inseong shoves him back, the fevered choking that follows. Blood-flecked saliva splatters Inseong’s jaw, his neck. Almost pink, marking the trembling curl of his mouth.

As his other hand trails down to Chanhee’s chest, tugging at the buttons. In this cramped, stuffy room, a breeze grazes the skin above his heart, ribbon tickling his stomach. Inseong’s finger, poised and precise, traces the shape of Chanhee’s bow, arches to snag in the loop. The first pull feels like a slice, pain dripping into Chanhee’s nerves like a vaccine. The second, a flaying, his wounds being opened wide.

Black and white thundering around them, marbled lightning. Sometimes ash, sometimes bare wood. Sometimes Chanhee smells flames and sometimes Inseong’s blood, acrid and metallic beneath his nose.

Chanhee closes his eyes for the third, but it never comes. Instead, Inseong’s knuckles drag down Chanhee’s sternum, coming to a rest at the base of his breastbone.

“What are you doing?” he demands. No—it’s too wet for that. Thick and desperate. A single tear drips onto Chanhee’s knee, searing like acid.

“Didn’t you tell me?” Chanhee’s head lolls against the wall. “Aren’t you the one who told me to trust you? To do this, and the pain will fade away?”

The heel of Inseong’s hand slams against Chanhee’s chest. “You’re meant to stop me.” His voice cracks, the world flickering with it, in relentless, dissonant harmony. “Why aren’t you stopping me? Why aren’t you—”

His hand quivers, fingers gouging into Chanhee’s skin. Chanhee takes the opportunity to silently free Jaeyoon’s ribbon from Inseong’s grasp.

“What did you do to him?” Chanhee asks again, tucking the ribbon into his sleeve. A severed stretch, hardly enough to span Chanhee’s palm. How long…? “Inseong—”

Inseong’s mouth works soundlessly, and as he does, the darkness crackles like static, blinking, blinking, faster than Chanhee can close his eyes. Relentless, dizzying, impassable like wax; an onslaught of everything Chanhee can’t parse.

Inseong throws himself back, the audible sound of his palms slapping the floor. “You need to go.”

“Answer my question! For once, just—”

But Chanhee catches the look in Inseong’s eyes, wild and torn and so, so desperate, and stumbles to his feet, clutches Jaeyoon’s ribbon to his chest. Inseong doesn’t stop him. Not as Chanhee slithers past him on shaking legs. Not as he reaches the door, Inseong’s suite.

And not as Chanhee glances back. Inseong on his knees, hand braced against the side of the coffin. “Go,” he croaks, a raw, guttural sound, pupils devouring the remnant brightness of his eyes. “Leave me again.”

Even as Chanhee is propelled out of the room by his own momentum, he spins back, but the door slams shut, separating them. Instead of Inseong’s suite and messy bed, Chanhee is greeted by fire.

Small, smouldering, ash sizzling in stripped corners, in torn walls bearing their innards. And smoke, smoke, a fortress of cinders, coating his throat, his lungs, swallowing soot over and over. Blazing tears roll to Chanhee’s eyes and they won’t stop.

Burning. The mansion is—how long—

He staggers forward blind, aching, groping his way through murky shadow. The nexus he remembers has devolved, mutated, ash wrapping every corner, sparks skating the floor like autumn leaves.

Shadows shroud every path forward, each route indistinguishable from the next. Chanhee has Jaeyoon’s ribbon and his own torn wits, and no idea where to go, until a voice pierces the silence.

“I tried.” Chanhee whirls around at the sound of Inseong’s voice, so close he swears he can feel breath, but when he looks, there’s nothing but a dead-end, blackness, chasing his heels.

Where is Inseong’s door? Where is— “Inseong?”

Chanhee scuffs on his heels, heart restless, as the sound of Inseong’s voice continues through the nexus, broken in a cacophony of spasming breaths. “It was meant—I meant—it was supposed to be paradise.”

An echo. Like radio signals, static. Chanhee scrubs a hand under his scorching eyes. What is he supposed to be running from?

Then, silence. The soft rasp of Inseong’s breath, settling over Chanhee’s skin like a cloak. “I wanted to make...”

Listening to him, the gentle hiccup of his voice, the words that slur together at the edges, Chanhee almost misses the rhythm of approaching footsteps, skirting the edges of his hearing. Slow, at first, but quickly gaining speed, as Inseong continues to murmur around him, half-noises and rambles, stuttering with tears.

Chanhee flings himself around a corner as the footfalls spike into a sprint, blurring past him at dizzying speed. Pressed up against the wall, the texture of crumbling plaster through his thin shirt. Chanhee inhales and exhales, but it does nothing to alleviate the heaviness in his chest, the acrid flavour on his tongue. His fingers, scrabbling into the torn wall until they bleed.

His knees buckle, unable to support his weight, as everything, everything, crashes into him. Heaving, tears mixing with saliva, with his blood, on the soot-stained floor. Only then does he notice it, recessed into the wall. A trapdoor, no larger than the opening to a crawl-space, etched with deep, blunt scratches. Half-shapes and letters, rapidly walking as Chanhee drags himself closer.

YOUNGKYUN, reformulating, rearranging itself, letters twisting and bleeding into one another. Chanhee shoves a blind hand to the carvings. Traces HWIYOUNG underneath his quivering fingertips.

Chanhee’s shoulders fill the narrow tunnel of the crawl-space, crushed tight like hands around his throat. Elbows scraping the stone walls, knees bludgeoning cement, the void in front of him dazing, unfocused, scarcely a pinprick. Chanhee pulls himself out, one arm stroke at a time, gasping through the tightness pummelling his chest.

There’s a door on the other end. Chanhee pounds at it until his fist bursts through the wood. As something thunders in vicious requiem, cut by sobs that fade into white noise; Chanhee’s fingers strike tile, cool and wet to the touch, moisture running down the tips of his fingers. Coming back rusty in the half-light.

Horror plummets in Chanhee’s stomach. Blood, in rust-coloured swirls, slicked across the tiles, clinging to the grout. Slashed across his hands and arms; the end of Jaeyoon’s ribbon, dipped in it like paint.

“Fuck.” And Youngkyun’s voice is as raw as Chanhee has ever heard it, seizing and hollow and furious. Chanhee manages to haul himself to his feet just as Youngkyun resumes kicking at the bathtub, the blunt, sickening sound of porcelain bruising flesh. “Fuck! It’s not—fair.”

His hands slam the side of the bath until it rattles. Heaving, long, choppy hair falling straight over his eyes, the sticky sides of his cheeks. Blood splattering his shirt, the hollow of his throat, dark carnations from his neck to his chest. Weeping, from a perfect line stitched into his forearm, rolling ruby droplets, tracing tributaries, new veins onto Youngkyun’s hand, blooming in dilute puddles at his feet.

Dying. He’s dying, hemorrhaging, Chanhee coated in his blood, viscous and pungent, and when he says Youngkyun’s name, so frail he can hardly hear it, Youngkyun whirls to him immediately. His fingers are wet, slick with his blood—theirs shared, because what else could it be, when it’s seeping into Chanhee’s bones?—and Chanhee staggers when he stands, legs barely able to hold his weight.

In the dirty bathroom mirror, they are two shadows, spectres. Ghost hands trail up Chanhee’s arms, his shoulders, gouge into his flesh.

“You’re not really here,” Youngkyun breathes out. The crazed pinprick of his pupil quivers in his eye.“I know you’re not—I know—and yet I want it—so badly to be true. Stupid, right? I'm—I still needed you to stop me. And you weren’t here. Chanhee…” He shakes his head, wetness spilling out onto his cheeks, mixing with the ash and sweat on Chanhee’s skin. “I think I—did something I can’t come back from.”

Drip. Drip. Drip. Louder than any heartbeat. How many seconds, minutes?

“You’re not going to die,” Chanhee snaps. “Idiot. Idiot.”

Youngkyun’s face crumples.

“Thought I-I was okay to be alone for this part. I…” Youngkyun breaks off in a dilapidated moan. Distressed, he buries his face in the crook of Chanhee’s neck, trembling hand tendering the space between them like capturing Chanhee’s heartbeat would breathe new life into his own; if Chanhee could give it to him, he would. “Sorry I won’t be here when you get back. I’ll say hi to him, for you, okay? So, maybe you’ll forgive me for not saying bye.”

“What are you talking about? Idiot,” Chanhee says again, a splintered crack in his throat. “Why did you—why can’t I fix it?”

Youngkyun shakes his head, the slow rhythm of his breaths like cold salt-spray against Chanhee’s neck. “You know I love you, right? I wrote it, so you’ll always—tell Youngbin to find the note for you, okay? I really love you. I really…”

Chanhee closes his eyes as the full force of Youngkyun’s weight topples into him. There, upon icy-cold tiles, the last of his breaths petering out, Chanhee learns what it’s like to lose a piece of ribbon: like being butchered, gutted. A piece of the life-force he so ardently wanted to gift Youngkyun, and it still couldn’t save him.

Unbidden, tears sting Chanhee’s eyes. “Is this what you wanted my ribbon for?” he asks Inseong, heaving, desperate. He expects no response, and gets none.

Chapter Text

CHANHEE HAS NO IDEA how long he lies there. How time spans in the nexus. If it’s already too late. It seems so easy, to stay here now, pinned beneath Youngkyun’s body as it grows ever-colder, wait for the shadows and fakes to crawl their way in.

The unshed tears have dried in his ducts. His eyes are brittle and sore to open.

Youngkyun is dead. Youngkyun tried to kill him. This isn’t really Youngkyun. Three statements, three truths, yet Chanhee can’t remember why it matters. Everything else is real: the sprawl of Youngkyun’s body against the tile. Youngkyun desperately barricading Chanhee from the door, to no avail.

The choking numbness, in the hours and weeks that followed.

Slowly, Chanhee extricates himself from beneath Youngkyun’s limp body and pulls himself to his feet. The room is silent, save for his shallow breaths, his feet padding across the freezing bathroom tile. He approaches the full-length mirror, his own reflection hallowed and gaunt, Youngkyun’s blood crusting over his mouth and jaw, a red-painted target.

Chanhee strikes true. His fist drives through the glass, the pain blinding, grounding, brilliant, as the mirror crumples into stardust and glittering dust, spiralling into a volatile mess at Chanhee’s feet.

Smoke rises from the debris. Dark, heady plumes fill the mirror’s gilt frame, and the vaporous darkness beyond, a whirlwind of sparks and smog. Chanhee’s eyes sting and his lungs smoulder and his skin burns. Red glows through the cracks in the floor, heat rolling from its surface in shimmering waves.

Chanhee steps through the mirror as the molten darkness melts into solid wall behind him, dripping wax, a fiery, suffocating chamber. He’s back in labyrinthine hallways, shadow-drenched tunnels with no end in sight. A flaming pillar blocks off one pathway, bursting through into the adjacent wall, flames rising like a nestful of birds learning to take flight. As they do, sparks in starburst clouds, the ground cracks, hisses menacingly, but before Chanhee can put his finger on the noise, something clips into his side, sending him plunging to the floor.

Beneath the smoke, Chanhee can finally breathe. He looks up, winded and startled, at another version of Youngkyun’s face: curly hair windswept and colour in his cheeks. Vivid, alive, like a desert mirage.

“Thought I saw a…” Youngkyun breathes out. Stops, as he scans Chanhee’s face, his frayed ribbon, and finally the blood, like Chanhee was the one who died.

Chanhee lunges for Youngkyun’s wrist, relieved when he feels ribbon instead of raw skin.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Youngkyun’s calloused hand is rough against Chanhee’s cheek. “What the hell happened to you?”

“‘S’not my blood,” Chanhee replies. Does his part in pushing Youngkyun off him, the two of them vulnerable there on the floor, like snared rabbits.

Youngkyun props himself up on his hands. “Then—”

“It’s yours.” Chanhee can still feel it, cold and congealed against his abdomen. “I went through the door with your name on it. Your fake killed himself.”

Youngkyun’s expression fluctuates between fear, concern, and confusion. “That’s—a lot to unpack,” he finally says. “But—”

“What?” Chanhee presses, as Youngkyun’s gaze pins itself to an instinct point over Chanhee’s shoulder.

“Another door. I can’t quite—read the name.” Youngkyun rises into a cat-like crouch, extending his hand to Chanhee. Chanhee takes it without hesitation. “I’m not gonna die this time.”

Chanhee lets Youngkyun haul him to his feet. Together, fingers wound in some semblance of inseparability, they approach the mystifying door. Like before, the letters don’t make sense, jumbling and swerving and crashing into one another until they get close.

YOO TAEYANG.

Youngkyun’s hand darts for the door-handle before Chanhee can so much as open his mouth.

The pungent smell hits him first. Clinical, sterile, sour, spreading heavy over the air. Next: the lights, so white and luminous they’re blinding, like over-exposure. Finally: the familiar roughness of Sanghyuk’s voice, volatile and desperate.

“I am family,” he snaps, as wheels squeak down the hospital concourse. “I’m his family too, you have to let me—”

Youngkyun lunges to reach him, but Chanhee grabs his arm, holding him back as a stretcher rolls down the narrow hallway, Taeyang strapped to its surface. His body is porcelain, still, his chest scarcely rising and falling with his breath. It’s almost easy to believe there’s nothing wrong with him, almost, save for the bandage wrapped around his head, dark shocks of hair spilling across its surface like piano keys.

This time, when Youngkyun protests against Chanhee’s grip, Chanhee lets him go. Family. That’s what they are, promised to be, but it’s falling apart, crumbling ceaselessly. Chanhee can pinpoint when it started, but he still can’t—.

They made a promise. But Chanhee can see the cracks: the tiredness in Youngbin’s eyes when he comes to visit, the pallor to Jaeyoon’s smile even as he tries to make Chanhee laugh. The extra snacks to compensate for the ones Hwiyoung would bring, though they don’t taste the same anymore.

It’s obvious in their faces that it’s getting harder and harder to hold on.

“Dammit.” Youngkyun makes a frustrated lap in front of Sanghyuk, hands dragging down his face. Bloodwarm pink, blooming in the wake of his fingers. “He can’t hear me, Chanhee. It’s like he doesn’t even see me, or—I don’t know. I don’t…” he trails off, his shoulders sagging as he glances back at Sanghyuk.

Sanghyuk, staring aimlessly down the hallway though Taeyang is long gone. Sanghyuk, with his jaw set, emotion simmering relentlessly beneath his skin. Sanghyuk, with his fists clenched, holding himself back.

As Youngkyun steps aside, Chanhee approaches, and Sanghyuk’s gaze snaps right to him. No, right through him. The distant, chilled eyes of someone who can only see ghosts.

“Youngkyun could see me,” Chanhee murmurs. Swallows, but it doesn’t seem to—

He looks around for Youngkyun, who has slipped further up the hallway, out of place in his loose shirt and monochromatic colours, yet: invisible, unseen. His body is propped up against the wall, ear cupped to the plaster. “What are you doing?”

“Listen with me a sec.” Youngkyun curves his hand around Chanhee’s skull, easing him to the wall beside him. “Do you hear that?”

Layers and layers of echoing conversation, at once convoluted and clear, like every ongoing conversation in the building is being fed into his ear at once in raucous, chaotic symphony.

But only one matters, and Youngkyun’s lips pull into a hard, uncompromising line. Maybe so that it won’t shatter.

“His brain’s bleeding,” he says, with all the blunt carelessness of someone who hasn’t processed their thoughts now. “He’s dying, Chanhee. And Sanghyuk doesn’t even—they won’t tell him yet. What if he’s still alone when he—”

Chanhee searches his face: hard edges and clamped lips and eyes that have to keep blinking or else they’ll falter. “They can’t see us,” he says, reaching for Youngkyun’s beribboned arm. “We can stay with him.”

Youngkyun nods twice, silently.

But when they get to Taeyang’s door, something shifts in his demeanour. Instead of forcing his way inside, Youngkyun tugs on Chanhee’s sleeve, and pulls Chanhee down with him as his back slides down the wall.

They stay there. Through the arrival of Taeyang’s parents, their distress clawing at the walls like his little hospital room can’t contain it. Sanghyuk, finally being allowed into the room, Chanhee shivering when Sanghyuk’s leg scythes right through him. Juho steering Youngbin’s wheelchair, their fingers joined so intricately Chanhee wonders if they’re fused.

They stay there as the shadows change and falter, as Taeyang’s guests pass in and out and in again, breaking, afraid, snatching his last moments in their fingers.

When Youngkyun finally speaks again, his voice wavers, “I never said goodbye to him.”

Chanhee pulls his knees up to his chest. “The fake told me there was a note. You must’ve said goodbye to him there.”

Youngkyun’s tears glitter in the fluorescent light. “But, I—I remember, Chanhee. I never said it.”

Chanhee toys with the hem of his trouser leg, and Youngkyun exhales a shuddering sigh.

After that, Chanhee loses track of time; Youngkyun dozes in and out of fitful sleep against his shoulder, his stomach, his lap. But, he’s awake when it happens,when the air changes, when the silence is too deafening to bear. Awake, when Chanhee next hears Inseong’s voice, the soft staccato of his breaths, weeping the tears Youngkyun will only do quietly, the ones Chanhee can’t seem to shed at all.

As Chanhee shakes life into his dead legs, attempting to stand, Youngkyun’s hand sneaks into his.

“Do you still think we can escape?”

Chanhee shrugs. Stares at his feet. “Think I have to.”

“Okay.” Youngkyun lets his hand slip, fall, crash back down to his side. “Then, I’ll come find you. But, first, I think I’m gonna stay here for a bit longer.”

Chanhee nods, but falters as a new thought occurs to him. “How far did you get?”

“Huh?”

“Out of the mansion,” Chanhee reiterates. “How far did you get?”

Youngkyun’s head lolls back against the wall in thought. “Taeyang went back because he had a bad feeling. But I was almost at the stables,” he adds, and Chanhee hisses, the truth striking his stomach like a sucker punch.

That far? And the nexus still consumed him, like everything else, in fire and devastation.

Maybe the escape he’s searching for will go up in flames long before Chanhee gets there.

Maybe there’s already nothing left.

▬▬▬

“—thought he just passed out. But, if this has been going on for—god knows how long—”

“He’s sick, hyung.”

“But—he could’ve given us more time, Zuho.”

“You know why he does it.”

“Couldn’t he tell us that? Is this how we have to find out—when he could be—”

“Maybe. But all we can do is be here for him now. Even if…”

“W-what, Youngbin-hyung?”

“‘Ven if it makes me hate him.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“A little bit, I think—I think I hate him. I hate that it’s made us like this, and I can’t—but I can’t—”

“No, you don’t. You… You don’t hate him. Hate us. Hate what he’s made us, but you can’t—”

“Ah… Yeah. Yeah, Jaeyoonie. Yeah. I hate what he left behind so much more.”

▬▬▬

“You don’t have to go through that door.” Behind him, Seokwoo’s voice is low and sweet, softened by the privacy of the nexus around them, its walls closing in. Like the heat that lingers at the very edge of the flame, before your hand dives in.

“I don’t want to,” Chanhee replies. Why would he? Youngkyun, then Taeyang…

He turns away from the etchings as Seokwoo makes a quiet noise of approval. “Good. Then let’s go.”

Shaking his head, Chanhee studies him: standing a few feet away, a few feet away, same dark hair, same almost smile. Seokwoo’s shirt is buttoned, but does little to hide the open expanse of his throat, golden and marred and undisguised.

Chanhee spins back to the door, its carvings flickering from JUHO to ZUHO to JUHO like rapid-fire. Flinches, as he hears Seokwoo step closer, the sound of a floorboard settling beneath his feet.

Then, he stops. He doesn’t need to do anything else; they both know that. If he is predator and Chanhee is prey, then it’s only a matter of time before Chanhee flees or succumbs. Why speed up the inevitable, when Seokwoo can lie in wait for it to happen?

“You’re not him,” Chanhee says.

Seokwoo exhales a long-suffering sigh. “I’d like to be. If… if you let me.”

“Why do you want it?”

“Because it’s yours.” Another step. Any closer, and Chanhee is sure he could feel this fake Seokwoo’s breath on the back of his neck, feel it infiltrate his nerves.

“A real answer.”

“Because I want it.” Again. True to Chanhee’s expectations, Seokwoo’s presence lingers at his back, warm and undeniable. “We exist because of you. You have what we want.”

“What?”

Seokwoo’s voice drops to a whisper. “A way out.”

He lunges for Chanhee’s chest at the same moment Chanhee throws himself back, groping for the handle of Juho’s door. Scorching brass softens in his grasp, almost liquid, dripping through his fingers. The door bursts open just as Seokwoo pins him to it, and Chanhee leverages his disorientation, the loosening of his hand, to wrangle himself out of Seokwoo’s grasp.

The moment he slams the door shut, it disappears in front of him, trapping him in the world beyond.

Blades of soft, dew-slick grass flatten underfoot. The night air is fresh, but fleeting, filling Chanhee’s lungs sweetly and deeply yet still somehow not enough. The moon hangs above him like a prop, stark and white and luminous, emitting a silvery glow that ices his surroundings in thready, broken lines: a wide, open field; dilapidated fragments of fence; an abandoned car, half-scrapped, ground halfway up a hill. A horizon carved with distant moors fades into the darkness.

Juho must be somewhere here. The thought comes to him with the sickening absence of fear; his mind reeling forward into cold, settled acceptance. Something he can feel: in his stomach, his chest, the far, far recesses of his mind. He’s too late. He’ll always be too late.

As the only tangible landmark in the vicinity, Chanhee approaches the car first, its front concertina-crushed, sides scratched and dented. Wheels clinging for dear life into the soft earth, finding purchase in deep, gouged-out ruts, like someone continually accelerated into the ground until the car ran out of battery. The lid of the boot hangs half-open; Chanhee snags his fingers under its lip to force it open.

The inside is bare, nondescript: black car upholstery and little else, as clean as if it were driven straight from the showroom.

Save for the gnarled snatch of fabric bunched tight into the corner, caught between vice-teeth. Tartan: dark forest green, striped with orange and red and navy. The corner of a car blanket, the rest nowhere to be found.

Until Chanhee abandons the car, his only tether in his vast, haunting expanse, to go further. The breeze crawls up his arms, the back of his neck, chilled, icy spines. Wanders forward, mindless, aimless, still bereft of oxygen that refuses to satiate him.

In the end, finding Juho is easy.

Lying there, still within sight of the car that must’ve brought him here. Sprawled, tartan blanket contorted around the length of his body, disguising its disfigured shape. One arm, bent tight behind his back. His leg, peeking out from beneath the material at an odd, warped angle. The mask of pain immortalised upon his hard features, dog out with bloody shovels and set with stone. Thick crusts of blood mat his hair, bruised knuckles, the mangled remains of his clothes.

Youngbin couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t even tell him this much. Chanhee wonders if it’s really saving him, to never know what Juho was like in his final moments.

Chanhee tries to think of it, him, cold and alone, but the image is formless, distorted. Not Juho.

Killed. Juho was—and until now, Chanhee didn’t know what that looked like.

Chanhee drops to his knees, dew soaking into his trousers, his skin. When he puts his hand on the tartan blanket, it’s cold to the touch. Blood, a dark, enticing wound, drenching the fibres.

He could pull back the blanket. Bare what lies beneath to the chilled night air, but what would it change? Chanhee could reach inside, rearrange snapped bones and slick tissue and shredded organs, but it wouldn’t bring him back.

Instead, Chanhee leaves the blanket aside to reach for Juho’s hand, interlock their fingers. His palm is a dead, rigid weight against Chanhee’s own.

Chanhee tips his head back, the sky wide and empty above him. For once, the weight of being watched is comforting.

▬▬▬

“Aren’t I supposed to be the one resting?” Chanhee asks sourly, and, Jaeyoon, his arms folded on top of the covers, laughs heartily, cheeks widening in his signature bright smile.

“But, I brought snacks,” he protests, lip protruding in a pout. “And I travelled a long way.”

“And if you fall asleep, I don’t want you to drool on my sheets.” Chanhee pinches the paper-thin fabric by Jaeyoon’s mouth between a thumb and forefinger.

Jaeyoon grins. “So, if I promise—”

“I’ll call Dawonie-hyung to drag you out,” Chanhee threatens.

Jaeyoon nods, tickled and fond, hands rising in surrender even as his fingers twitch. “No falling asleep.”

Chanhee leans back against the headboard, fingers rolling back and forth across the creases in the covers, creating hills, valleys across his lap. “Did you have a busy schedule today, hyung?” he asks, and perhaps it’s cruel, to do so when he already has the answer, but…

At the unexpected question, Jaeyoon’s smile tightens briefly at the corners, sharpening into a brittle mask of itself. “No,” he says, somehow managing to maintain some of that sweetness. “You know how it is.”

They’re falling apart at the seams, he means. Dungeoned. News outlet poster boys that can’t show their faces. Chanhee has their names muted all over SNS, skips anything that remotely tows the line of celebrity news. It isn’t worth it, to see their faces, plastered up like a shrine, as if they’re counting down who’s next.

Chanhee ghosts his fingers over the surface of the painting, their faces carved in contoured values. Now, Chanhee can clearly see eight, eight, the number resonating with a particular, aching fondness. Bittersweetness and nostalgia, rolled into one. But time and fire have warped some of their features, rendering them unrecognisable. Chanhee counts who’s left: Juho, Youngbin, Sanghyuk. Seokwoo, Youngkyun, Jaeyoon, Taeyang, and himself, scratched out and gone.

Chanhee’s other hand tugs his collar up to his mouth, breathing shallowly through the sweat-dampened fabric. In the grim underbelly of the mansion, he has little way of getting through but ducking his head and enduring. Steeling himself against what comes next.

Smoke swallows Chanhee’s timid sense of light. His shoulders scuff the tunnelling corridors, wormed without rhyme or reason into the vicinity, and direction becomes meaningless to him. Just the grain of unfinished wood beneath his feet, brick scraping through plaster against the tips of his fingers, and the acridity that permeates everything this far below ground or consciousness, untouched by the sun.

He tiptoes forward, as soot soils the ground, transforming the floor texture from rough, hewn wood to neatly-set panels, slotted into place. The woven texture of a hallway runner, a chaotic abundance of shoes lining the walls like sediment.

Someone’s apartment, captured at the peak of afternoon. The hallway opens up into a small, messy living-room, rapturous sunlight scintillating through beaming windows, reflecting off the shiny floor in a golden mosaic.

This time, Chanhee has no need to prepare himself. Or, at least, in retrospect, he decides he doesn't need it, when the cruel tesseract of the nexus refuses to grant him reprieve.

Because, lying there, the dark border of his shadow trimmed out of the lustre, is Jaeyoon. Face down into the wood, arms askew beside his head.

The thought comes to Chanhee familiarly: that, ordinarily, he might expect Jaeyoon to be lying there out of exhaustion, if there was such thing as ordinary between them.

Standing on his spot, Chanhee's stomach twists, and he wonders if there was once, what ordinary meant for them at all.

But, Chanhee knows by now, it's a foolish, delusional thought. The shock of crimson staining Jaeyoon's back makes that very clear.

Chanhee reaches for Jaeyoon's shorn ribbon inside his sleeve, frayed edges tickling his fingertips.

Edges forward. Despite the warmth of the sun soaking into the wood, the air surrounding Jaeyoon feels cold and untouchable.

Gently, Chanhee lowers himself into a kneel beside Jaeyoon's waist, an unsteady hand urging the fabric of his t-shirt up his back. The fabric sticks to the gash, Jaeyoon's skin. Chanhee's hand comes back red.

A knife-wound. Short and jagged, punctured into the centre of Jaeyoon's spine. Someone must’ve attempted to clean up the blood, because it clings only to the cracks between floor panels, the wood grain, in dirty streaks of rust.

Swallowing, Chanhee brandishes the little fragment of ribbon and presses it to the wound, allowing himself to believe, for a moment, that it could—

Fix things? Change things? Wind things back to where it all began?

There's blood on his sleeves now, his knuckles. His fist, when he snatches the ribbon back and tucks it into his sleeve.

Silk against the quiver of his pulse: a full, perfect circle.

▬▬▬

I’m trying to understand you, Chanhee said once, and only now does he feel like he’s starting to.

He navigates his way down a skeleton of the mansion’s second-floor hallway, its peeling wallpaper and crumbled support-frames like tissue and bone.

Finding Seokwoo’s door is second-nature; Chanhee has done it so many times that his feet map their way there without him even needing to think. In some ways, it’s no different than sneaking here at night, tempering his footsteps, his breaths, Seokwoo’s room beckoning him by lamplight through the ajar door.

The gold name-plate no longer reads Dr. Seokwoo Kim, as it once did, but ROWOON, in jagged, ugly strokes, as if gutted from the soft metal with the scuffed edge of a penknife.

Chanhee urges the door open, and it squeaks noisily on rusted hinges, exhaling a thick cloud of sooty, grey dust. He tracks it into the air; a smokescreen that devours the mirage in front of him and the door behind him, enveloping his vision in darkness.

When he opens his eyes again, Youngbin and Seokwoo are bundled and ready to go: Youngbin cramming his floppy hair under a beanie whilst the hems of Seokwoo’s gloves snap into place around his slender wrists.

“You’re going already?” Chanhee blinks, trying to sit upright against the bed, but his arms are leaden with exhaustion and the covers too soft, wilting beneath his weight. As it is, he only manages to awkwardly prop his head against the headboard.

Youngbin shakes his head, equal parts fond and exasperated. “There’s a button for that. Do you need me to change it?”

“It’s fine, hyung,” Chanhee says, and Youngbin nods, in a sharp, stunned way. Chanhee sighs. It’s not easy, being like this. Knowing he needs help and yet wanting nobody to touch them. But it’s tough for Youngbin too. In all their time together, there have been few things he hasn’t been able to fix. “Thanks,” Chanhee adds, and Youngbin manages a smile.

“Do you want us to bring back anything?”

“We can get you new flowers,” Seokwoo suggests.

“Yeah. Sounds good.”

“Same time tomorrow?” Youngbin adjusts the curled lip of his beanie for the third time, glancing at Seokwoo as he tips his head to the door.

Seokwoo nods, already waving at Chanhee on his way out of the hospital room. “See you tomorrow, Chanhee-ya.”

The door thuds shut behind them, their conversation echoing in the distant hallway.

Instead of the simple comforts and necessities of Seokwoo’s room, the long line of his body, sprawled upon the mattress and drenched by firelight, Chanhee is greeted by an eerie, warped stillness. A dim photograph of a multi-storey car park, lit only by squares of evening through the gaping windows. Cars scattered sparsely in tones of silver and black, like a monochrome shot.

The only conceivable way forward is the wide, empty ramp, studded with sharp rolls of gravel, sloping down onto the floor below. The sky darkens the lower he goes, the purple hues of twilight seeping in like ink on wet paper, and the cars double in number, parked in unyielding, straight lines like a battle formation.

On the penultimate floor, Chanhee tastes the rich, ashen sweetness of a bonfire. A dark smog climbs from the ramp in wisps and curls, temperature rising with it. Chanhee rubs his hands, his arms, as sharp, sudden heat sears his ears, the back of his neck; he can taste salt across his top lip, sweat rolling down without warning or reprieve.

But, as he approaches the final ramp, he’s stopped by a voice.

“Not there. Not yet,” Inseong murmurs, so quiet, as if Chanhee isn’t meant to hear at all. Stubborn, he shoves his hand into the smoke, and Inseong releases a broken whimper in response. “I-If—if you truly want to understand…”

Up to his wrist, his elbow. Dark, curdled fingers looping around his skin. “Isn’t that what I said?” he tells Inseong’s echo, before submerging himself completely.

Something pops above him, all around him, in that pocket of all-consuming space Inseong occupies.

“I’m terrified,” he admits, as Chanhee emerges from the darkness—not onto the bottom floor of the car park, but the side of a busy street, late afternoon sun spreading out like a balm over his surroundings.

Chanhee squints, assaulted by sudden noise: buzzing white noise, the cheer of birds overhead, phones and chatter and laughter. But that’s all it is: sound. No people. No birds, no phones. Just a set, props and dressings, recreating yet another tragic play.

As this settles in, his brain recalibrating, Chanhee finally opens his eyes to destruction.

A car bursts off the junction to ram into another, idling by the side of the road. Metal grinds against metal with a sickening bone crunch, followed by a symphony of shattering glass as the first car swings back into the convenience store window. Inside, something crashes, and Chanhee’s stomach churns.

“I—I didn’t—” Inseong starts, horrified.

“Is this less terrifying to you?” Chanhee snaps. In a split-second decision, he races into the shade of the convenience store. The door won’t open, jammed in place by a collapsed shelf, so he picks through the broken window instead, attempting to dodge the fallen blades of glass.

The shelf blocking the door has ruptured, ramyeon cups and assorted drinks littering the white-tiled floor, cracked lumps of pale noodle sliding under its suspended side. Why is it—

Trembling, Chanhee kicks a torn cup aside to reveal a curled hand, sticking out from underneath the broken shelf. Connected to a long, black-clad arm, a mangled shoulder, a bludgeoned chest, and the crushed bulb of a throat, bearing the brunt of the weight.

If the length of his arm wasn’t clue enough, then his coat, shiny and puffy and distinct, the one he’d been wearing when he waved Chanhee goodbye, makes it undeniable.

Seokwoo.

His wound that will never heal.

Chanhee bends down, drags his fingers up the exposed skin of Seokwoo’s forearm, the raised tributary of his vein. The absence of his pulse and the curve of his palm, callouses and fate lines, until he reaches the tips of Seokwoo’s fingers.

Suddenly, an apology seems—silly. Small. Ineffective.

Instead, Chanhee hovers his palm over Seokwoo’s for an instant before getting up, padding back out into the sunshine.

Chanhee surveys the scene: the first car, empty, yet another display prompt for this performance. But movement strikes his periphery from the second car, so that’s where Chanhee sets his sights.

The passenger-side door is wrecked, concave and refusing to open, so Chanhee rushes around to the other side of the car. There, a beanie-clad head lolls out of the open window, curled upward at the lip.

Chanhee fears the worst. He drops to a crouch, “Youngbin—” as Youngbin’s arm twitches to life, feebly groping for Chanhee’s forearm, then clamping down, hard. “You’re—”

“Ch—Chani?” Youngbin gasps out, wrecked. “What…”

“It doesn’t matter.” Chanhee wets his lips.

Youngbin gasps out a weak noise, his eyes dragging up to Chanhee’s. “You—Rowoon—”

Rowoon. Chanhee winces, his heart beating and beating. “He’s not…” he murmurs, so soft that when Youngbin chokes on a sob, it swallows Chanhee’s voice out of his throat entirely.

Chanhee knows how this will play out. He knows that he should tell Youngbin not to speak, to conserve his energy, even though it’ll be futile. He knows—somehow, in his consciousness—that the ambulance has already been called, but will ultimately arrive too late.

Even Youngbin’s tight, blood-drawing grip on his arm comes embedded with a countdown.

“Don’t think I’ll be able to visit tomorrow,” Youngbin says, eyebrows drawn together, sweet laughter tugging at the corners of his mouth. Striking Chanhee like a bee, its sting spreading fast under his skin.

“No, probably not,” he agrees.

“You’re gonna get better, though. I promise you will.” Youngbin’s eyelashes flutter, gaze skipping down the side of Chanhee’s face. “I promise,” he says again, as if that makes it any more true.

“Yeah,” Chanhee breathes. “You keep saying that.”

“Because you know I’m right.”

“I know.” Chanhee pauses. “I trust you.”

Youngbin’s mouth works, but no sound comes out, until: “Chanhee.”

“Hm?”

“I can’t—” He closes his eyes, tipped crescent moons. “I can’t feel my legs.”

Chanhee swallows. Nods. He hasn’t looked, but the scent of blood hangs in the air, raw and heavy. Maybe it’s a blessing. Chanhee tells himself it’s a blessing.

“Chanhee,” Youngbin says again. His fingers dragging along Chanhee’s forearm to his wrist.

If this Youngbin tried to kill him now, Chanhee wonders if he could be anything but grateful. “Yeah?”

Silence. Youngbin’s grip slackens before falling free, his arm hanging limp over the side of the car door, eyes half-lidded and his face permanently frozen in that same, comforting smile.

Reaching into Youngbin’s hair, Chanhee adjusts the lip of his beanie, smoothing it out one final time, before slowly closing Youngbin’s eyes.

This, Chanhee knows, isn’t the real end. There will be days and weeks more, of his smile, his weary eyes. Wheeling hospital corridors until that, too, becomes an impossibility; a nurse closing his eyes, instead of Chanhee.

“I never meant for this to…” Above them, Inseong emits a short, curdled laugh. “Not that anyone would believe me.”

“I believe you can’t stop me from getting to you,” Chanhee replies, even if he’s sure now that Inseong cannot hear him. Rising to his feet, he swallows the hard, defeated lump in his throat. “But, you can’t—I’m still trying.”

▬▬▬

Chanhee looks up at the trapdoor suspended above his head. A ladder hangs from its mouth, propped but not anchored against the wall.

This time, the letters don't warp in front of Chanhee’s eyes but instead flicker, every time he blinks. SANGHYUK, DAWON, SANGHYUK, DAWON.

Taking a deep breath, Chanhee skips the first rung and lifts himself onto the second, aged wood flexing beneath the arch of his sole, his fingernails, feeding into the cracks, as the ladder seems to stretch onward, the trapdoor dangling further and further out of his reach.

Chanhee grits his teeth. He's sick of this. The nexus, adopting any form it likes as his friends ply and bend and suffer to its whims.

Dogged, he hauls himself up the next few rungs with renewed, bitter determination, almost not noticing, when, aeons above him, the trapdoor slowly creaks open.

Dust showers onto his skin. Chanhee squints, eyes watering, and has never been so glad to see Taeyang’s ribbon, trickling onto his cheek, and his bright, relieved grin.

Chanhee takes his outstretched hand without hesitation.

Sanghyuk’s door opens back to the hospital waiting room, on a clear, crisp morning, though it’s far emptier than it was. Taeyang collapses first, back against an unoccupied row of plastic chairs, and Chanhee falls with him, the two of them recovering their breath upon the sticky, mopped tile.

Only then does Chanhee notice the small, silver pistol kept by Taeyang's curled hand. He nods to it, swallowing air. “You shot Inseong.”

“Hm?” Taeyang hums, startled out of his thoughts. “Yeah. I had to. Jaeyoon…”

“Is he okay?”

“I think so. We got separated.” Taeyang's jaw sets at the memory. “But Inseong managed to get ahold of his ribbon.”

“Right,” Chanhee says. Pulls back his sleeve, a glimpse of black beyond his grimy cuff. “I managed to get it off him.”

A faint smile touches Taeyang's lips. “Right,” he echoes, his face setting back into stone as it fades. “You don't remember any of this, do you?”

“No. Well…” Chanhee exhales. “I was here—a while ago. With Youngkyun.”

Taeyang’s gaze drifts to the side of Chanhee's face, equal parts soft and intense, as is every part of him. “When I died, right?”

Chanhee nods, searching Taeyang’s face. “You remember?”

Taeyang’s fingers trail through the ribbon entangled with his dark hair, and he exhales, slow and sober. “Neither of us made it to this part.”

Truthfully, his words confirm something Chanhee already knew. There was a timer on each of their lives; hourglasses, tipped upside-down in a dark room. One by the the sand petered out, leaving only the imprint of dust on the glass.

The edge of the plastic chair digs into Chanhee’s back. Puddles of light shift and change with the sun in the sky, as the morning ticks onward.

“What’s up with your eye?” Chanhee asks, skipping the greeting.

Dawon laughs, gesturing to the patterned eyepatch obscuring one of his eyes. “Oh, this? Don’t worry about it. Just a minor infection.”

When the time comes, it’s silent. A single drop of knowing that burrows into Chanhee’s bone marrow; an empty fact he can feel stretching underneath the surface of his skin.

Finally, they lose Dawon too, and the cycle completes.

▬▬▬

Jaeyoon peeks around the door first, followed by Taeyang, their expressions filling with warmth when Chanhee lifts his hand to wave. By now, he’s gotten used to this routine: his members carving out whatever time they can for him, between his constant appointments and monitored stays, their own visits to Youngbin, keeping up Chanhee’s spirits even as the days grow bleaker and bleaker.

Chanhee stares at his wrist, hooked up and pale, sage veins peeking up from beneath the translucency of his skin. He’s been so tired for months now.

“How are things looking?” Jaeyoon asks, once they’re both settled, chairs dragged so closely to Chanhee’s bedside that their knees are folded, shins pressed up against the mattress.

“Better,” Chanhee lies, and, immediately, a smiling Jaeyoon ferrets a wrapped cake out of his bag to split with him. Chanhee declines, his stomach unsettled, so Taeyang takes it instead.

“Like, you’ll be able to go home better?” Taeyang presses, and Chanhee shrugs. Taeyang doesn’t seem suspicious, exactly, but somehow, that makes it worse.

“I don’t get to decide,” he replies, “but, I don’t know. Maybe.”

Jaeyoon nods, mouth stuffed as he finishes off the last bites of his cake, while Taeyang jumps in to recount their day—maybe to fill up time—down to the meal they had before their car ride to the hospital.

Fitting their lives around the gaps. Like they didn’t end up like this. Like, last time he was home, Chanhee didn’t see the remnants of one of their album posters filling the bin, faces punched out and torn to shreds.

Like they’re still holding on, instead of going through the motions.

After a little while, Jaeyoon and Taeyang say their affectionate goodbyes, and trade shifts with Dawon and Zuho, clutching coffee cups from downstairs; Dawon just in a jacket thrown over his gym clothes, and his eyepatch strung over his eye.

Being with them is just as comfortable: Zuho and Chanhee discuss the show they’ve been watching, episode for episode, whenever Zuho has time. Dawon has a lot to say about—anything and everything: today’s workout, tomorrow’s plans, a restaurant he wants to try with Chanhee when he’s feeling up to it, a film he’s going to go see.

Listening to their familiar voices, soothing like a dream, Chanhee’s eyelids dip, weighted and heavy. A fond smile curling his lips, Zuho nudges his fist against Chanhee’s knee.

“You’re tired,” he states, his tone filled with an amused kind of scolding. “Do you want us to go?”

“S’okay,” Chanhee mumbles, peeking at them both through his lashes.

Dawon laughs. “We’ll try to be quieter.”

Chanhee nods, letting his head fall back against the headboard. Dawon laughs again, a lullaby, and Chanhee succumbs to the sound. On the very edge of sleep, he gives in, and he lets go.

▬▬▬

Chanhee squeezes his eyes shut as the smoke draws him in, suctioning, swallowing, skating across his skin and sinking in deep. At the mouth of the final ramp, he teeters forward, and, aeons above him, Inseong remains silent.

The ground floor of the car-park is the fullest of all, almost every space filled: frozen spectators, like props stuck in a scene. Crammed tight like cells, and, at the heart, an infection: fire lunging across the crushed metal of a car, a blazing orange chorus, and plumes of smoke, billowing sickeningly into the air.

Chanhee staggers forward, at the sight of a limp arm noosed by the shattered window. At the faintest touch, it collapses into diamond rain, littering the man’s body with tiny scars. Flames rove his face and neck and hands, gouging into the bone, melting away his features like a painting.

The lashes of one eye, the side of his nose, the corner of his mouth, slack in an expression of horror. Despite this, Chanhee finds ghosts of familiarity in this effigy: throat-warming laughter, so many hands held, kisses and touches and precious affection. It exists in the droop of his lips and the swoop of his scorched hair and the thin, sharp turn of his elbow; the shape of his eye and the glassy brightness of his gaze and the single mole, delicately imprinted in the crease.

It all rushes back, and Chanhee remembers.

“Inseong?” he whispers, shaking his arm, desperation making his movements jerky. “Inseong?”

Inseong’s head snaps up at the sound of his name, the room’s low lighting gathering shadows in the hollows of his cheekbones, the tender space beneath his jaw, only serving to make him look more gaunt. Closer to the him trapped in the coffin by his side, ribbons marking the landmarks where Chanhee once saw fire.

Instead, it has spread, grown, blazing autumn foliage taking root like a disease, seeping into the cracks of the wood, crawling up the beams. Enveloping Inseong in a storm of heat and sparks and choking ash, the air torched with the singe of finality.

And yet he sits there, cross-legged and so, so still, staring up at Chanhee with an unreachable look in his eyes.

Chanhee steps forward. “I found you,” he says. Looks around, this small box room that contains nothing, contains everything; Inseong, who is both and everything in between. Chanhee extends his hand, like Inseong once did for him. “Let's go.”

Inseong’s expression morphs from distant to stricken.

“Don’t,” he replies, throat scratched.

“Don’t what?” Chanhee challenges. “I think I finally understand you, Inseong. The mansion, the nexus, everything. It was all you. The paradise you created.”

Inseong’s jaw trembles. “You still don’t understand a thing,” he protests, and Chanhee is torn between scoffing and laughing, so he does both: a twisted, bitter sound.

“So, tell me, then. You trapped us here. And, everything—everything I just went through—that was you too, right? You made me relive that. You made me—night after night, Jaeyoon and Taeyang and Juho and—” his voice cracks.

Inseong’s head jerks, slamming against the side of the coffin. Eyes blown wide and shaking in the richness of his pupils. “I didn’t—”

Chanhee rolls his lips into his mouth, “Are you ever honest?” he snaps, and Inseong’s jaw sets.

“Tell me then,” he says, voice tremoring up out of his throat, wrought and volatile. Fingers digging into the cracking wood until his nails are scuffed and raw and bloody. “Tell me that you wanted to stay. That you ever—you think I trapped you, because you—you all wanted to leave me again the first moment you could!”

“You didn’t give us a choice!” Chanhee retorts, unable to uproot the bee-sting from his throat. Instead, its poison escapes, tainting the air around them, as dark and toxic as the coal dust fermenting in his every breath. “You could’ve told us, could’ve—”

“I didn’t want you to remember,” Inseong confesses, ragged. The sides of his face scorched bright and firelit, haloing him in orange and gold, and whispers of smoke rise up between his fingers, still jammed tightly into the floor as if scrabbling for purchase. As if Chanhee, his worlds, could tip the world out from Inseong’s feet. As if Chanhee has any power here at all. “I was trying to… I was protecting you!”

The fire chases him, moving to consume him. Chanhee’s eyes sting. “Our memories too,” he spits, lips quaking. Everything, then… “That was you as well.”

Inseong’s own eyes glitter: coated in oil and threatening to smoulder. “I was protecting you,” he repeats, and Chanhee drags his hands down his face, frustration and hurt crashing, colliding into one.

“You did it alone.” Against his wishes, the first tear falls, molten over the curve of Chanhee’s cheek. “I—we don’t care about your protection. None of us—we never did. Don’t you understand? I’ve only ever wanted your honesty, but, you still…”

Chanhee scrubs the tear away with a fierce hand, the second slick and sticky against his grimy wrist. In that brief glimpse beyond the smoke burning his eyes, he watches as Inseong flinches, lip caught up beneath his top teeth and bleeding, running down his cheek and onto his shirt, his abdomen, tracing the gaping wound of his heart, and—

Oh. The one who remembered. The one who had something to be afraid of.

“You’re the one who needs protecting,” Chanhee murmurs, the thought dawning on him like the slow rise of the sun. “That’s what you think, right? That’s why we’re here. Distracting you. Protecting you from facing your own loneliness.”

Inseong stiffens, mouth hanging open to protest, but Chanhee continues: “Even if it was our loneliness first. You keep saying we left you, but—that’s wrong. We just—we kept living. That’s all we could do, until…” he trails off, bowed by an onslaught of crippling memories, rolling together like clouds, dazed and dreamy and full of rain, threatening a storm. “But it was never—you were the one who left us.”

The sun reaches its peak. The fire axes at the walls. Chanhee dives into the feeling of Inseong being ripped from him with no hope of resurfacing. Drowning, so the pain and anger and tears are branded into his lungs.

Tears pour freely down Inseong’s cheeks, cutting through the thin layer of ash. “I died, Chanhee. Do you think I wanted—I just wanted to live with you.” He lifts his head, not looking at Chanhee, but the glimpse of his suite over Chanhee’s shoulder. “I just wanted to—” he starts again, cut off as the wall explodes behind him.

The impact slams into Chanhee like wind, debris coming to cradle his back and flailing limbs. Fish-hooked, he drags himself up, all too aware of blood running into his mouth with his saliva, mixing with the tears.

Thrown forward onto his hands and knees, Inseong crumples into the floor, his arms seemingly unable to hold his weight. As if that wish, that candle-flame hops, was woven into the very tissue of the muscles holding him upright, and now that it's bared, vulnerable, he can no longer keep himself upright.

His bloodied heart, served up on a platter for Chanhee to take.

“I wanted to stay with you,” Inseong says. Whispers. “Alive or dead, I just wanted to—”

And Chanhee can’t bear to listen to him anymore.

“—And I want to stay with you!” he snarls, or tries to, stung, betrayed by the eviscerated quality of his voice. Lost and angry and helpless. Peeling himself from the rubble, Chanhee reaches out his hand. “You idiot. Idiot. Hasn't that been obvious? If you'd just told me, I would've—” He shakes his head, a useless vessel for the turbulent emotions in his chest. “That's why we need to go. I want to be with you, anywhere but here.”

Inseong's eyes widen, sprayed orange and gold like a galaxy. Slowly, he lifts a leaden, quaking arm—

—and lets it drop, his fingers falling just short of Chanhee's.

Horror burns bright on his features. “I can't go with you,” he whispers. Tears drip from his chin and sizzle against the steaming floor, as he tilts his head to the coffin by his side, untouched and unmarred, as everything around them disintegrates. “I'm not the one who can leave here. He is.”

“Then take him with you!” Chanhee snaps. “But, I'm not leaving you behind.”

Inseong hesitates, searching Chanhee’s face, and whatever he finds there makes him nod, his fingers sliding into the embrace of Chanhee's. Together, the two of them gather the other Inseong's limp body, his body propped up between them.

Chanhee shuffles forward, and Inseong follows, trailing through the emaciated remains of the suite: ashen bedding and charred rugs; dark, potent burn marks gouged into his minimal furnishings. All memories of opulence melted away into wax.

A rendered skeleton of a ghost life, the bones of a long dream.

Chanhee wrestles open the door, the handle searing to the touch, but they're too late. Fire traces the hallway's skirting boards and panelling, walls cascading into ruin. At the far end of the hallway, a thick, dark pillar of smoke blooms from the stairwell.

“No good,” Chanhee mutters, turning back to Inseong. “We'll have to go through the window.”

Silent, Inseong swallows and nods, already dragging the other Inseong's body with him.

Heat has already torn at the wall, sill and frame, chilled window-glass shattering from the pressure. Chanhee briefly suspends himself into the void; the night air is no sweeter, no fresher. The pond glimmers in the sinking moonlight, aeons beneath them.

Inseong lumbers forward. Wraps one arm around Chanhee's waist, the other cradling his head, while dipping his own for Chanhee to do the same, the other Inseong pressed between them. Smoke-scented ribbons graze Chanhee’s skin, fill his line of sight.

He closes his eyes, synchronised with Inseong as they tip over into the ether below.

Next is an onslaught of sensations: wind whirling past his ears, the pressure of Inseong’s fingers digging into his skull. Loose ribbons whipping his skin raw.

The fierce embrace of the water as they crash into it headfirst, and Chanhee’s vision goes black.

Chanhee wakes up to the sound of horses snuffling, and crackling, warmth, but instead of the ferocious blaze from earlier, it's sweet and syrupy, curling under his skin. Someone, likely Seokwoo, has dressed the wound on his head.

Seokwoo is tending to the fire, but when he notices Chanhee's eyes open, he smiles. “Nice to see you awake.”

Next to Seokwoo, a mess of fabric pressed over his abdomen, Juho grins. “Took you long enough,” he says.

Chanhee sits up, looking around. On Seokwoo's other side is Youngbin, talking to Youngkyun who has his head on Jaeyoon's lap. Jaeyoon, a little pale, blood splattering his shirt, has an arm thrown around Sanghyuk's shoulders, and a wide, warm grin as they sway from side to side. Taeyang has an inscrutable, yet nostalgic expression as he gazes down at the inanimate body of the other Inseong, one finger tracing the seams of his ribbons.

Not dead. Dead. Alive. After all Chanhee saw, lived and relived, they’re all…

Inseong himself lays on Chanhee's other side, eyes closed and thigh bound, facing up towards the sky. Shoulder-to-shoulder with the other Inseong, it's easy to spot the differences: beyond the ribbons, the wounds, the other Inseong is—smaller, somehow. Slighter. Rounder at the edges, but not so full, and not yet sharpened to fit the shape of his pain.

An Inseong Chanhee might have gotten to know: older, wiser, composed of memories they never made, laughter they never shared. An Inseong that might have existed if Chanhee was the one to fade first.

Looking at him, at them all, clustered in a circle around the fire, a hard, traitorous lump forms in Chanhee's throat. Inseong lies on the dew-slick grass to Chanhee’s, still, but his chest rising and falling in even breaths. Chanhee looks at him, then back at Jaeyoon’s smile lines and Youngkyun’s scrunched eyes and Taeyang’s gentle fingers, and a large, hard lump surfaces in the tunnel of his throat.

Against all odds, they’re finally—

No. By Inseong’s design. Inseong, who shattered them to begin with, left them seeking for a wholeness they would never again achieve. Inseong, who crafted a world and made mosaics of their minds, bringing them together like kintsugi.

“Chanhee?” Youngbin says, hushed voice sanding off the hard edges of his concern. Instead, it slips into Chanhee’s consciousness softly, subliminally, shaped to his thoughts in a way that is impossible to fight against or ignore.

Chanhee shakes his head, defiant, even as he buries his face in his knees and sobs.

For the grief strung up, noosed with his memories. For a world that counted their lives on a timer; news outlets salivating over who would be next. For a group that wanted to hold on, even as their fingers slipped.

For Inseong, who left first, lost first, and still salvaged a dream from a dream.

Chanhee’s body heaves long after he’s run out of tears. He lifts his head from his knees, scrubs his face. Through the gaps in his fingers, he spots Youngkyun’s smile, his face as red and flooded as Chanhee’s own.

“We should get going now,” Youngbin says, a relieved laugh caught up in the thickness of his voice.

“Finally. Together,” Youngkyun adds, sitting up only to lean himself, his support, against Jaeyoon’s arm. “There’s a train we need to catch.”

Jaeyoon wipes the shine from his round cheeks and nods, eyes glittering, lips pulled into his mouth to disguise his distraught expression.

Sanghyuk tips his head at Chanhee. “Can you ride? The cart will be pretty full.”

Chanhee nods. His head and feet are sore, his throat parched and tasting of ash, but those things feel minor, distant from the unknown waiting for them.

“If it’s still there,” Inseong murmurs. The first lights of dawn crawl across the sky, reflecting powdered silver across his eyes.

Seokwoo frowns. “What do you mean? The fire hasn’t spread that far. The stables are completely fine.”

“The town existed because I put it there,” Inseong explains, falling silent as he glances over his shoulder. The fire has broken at the mirror-pool and floating gardens, but continues to rage, barricading the mansion’s remnants in thick, impassable smoke. A flickering pocket of darkness at its back as it’s swallowed by the nexus; Inseong’s paradise, vanishing in front of his eyes. “I don’t know if I still have enough control.”

“Do you control everything?” Youngkyun asks. His tone deliberately light, drawing attention away from the persistent bitterness lying in wait underneath.

Inseong meets his narrowed gaze, unflinching. “Not everything. The nexus exists as this world’s balance state. When I created the mansion, I channelled it into the guests, which was enough at first. But, when you arrived, it began to spill over. I… had to let it.”

Seokwoo’s expression twitches, and Chanhee feels a pang of sympathy. Even Lucy, who he had befriended, was a vessel for the nexus. A doll. And now, there’s nothing left of her.

“So, to maintain the illusion in some parts, you had to neglect others,” Taeyang summarises. His fingers freeze over the sphere of the other Inseong’s cheek, hovering, as if admiring a painting.

“Even now, the rest of the grounds only exist because the mansion and everything inside are being engulfed. As for the nexus, the most I could do was enter it for myself. I’ve—only ever had partial control. Less, when I, myself, lost control,” Inseong murmurs, head ducked. “I didn’t quite know about the fakes at first. Or how to protect you from them. Or even… how not to be like them.”

Silent, Chanhee peels the little scrap of Jaeyoon’s ribbon from his sleeve. Inseong takes it from him, their fingers brushing, and reaches across the circle—firelight illuminating his cheeks, the sharp tip of his nose—to return it to its owner.

Jaeyoon’s shoulders sink, his thumb smoothing along its length. “Why?” he asks.

“You know why,” Inseong replies softly, sadly. He glances around the circle: Jaeyoon, Seokwoo, Chanhee, his eyes glazed bright with contrition. “The ribbon represents your attachment to life, the burden of dying. By taking it away, the fakes wanted to take your places, but I—just wanted to prevent you from ever leaving me.”

“So, you got rid of yours,” Chanhee says. “You became a fake. So, why…”

Inseong flinches back, stricken, and in that, Chanhee understands. In the end, the one most terrified of death, of permanence, of the paradise he created, was Inseong himself.

“How did you do it?” Juho asks curiously. “Remove your ribbons. I assume you never lost your memories.”

“Oh…” Inseong blinks, regaining his composure like clockwork. “I carefully unstitched each ribbon from myself and sewed them into the fake, thus swapping our existences, in a sense. Of course, I needed to remember, and since the—real, and I coexist…”

Chanhee places his hand over Inseong’s in the dew-soaked grass. Chilled, despite all the flames they’ve seen. Without looking, even acknowledging him, Inseong flips his hand to entangle their fingers.

“I don't expect the rest of you to forgive me,” he says. A faint, pained smile stretches across his lips. “But, I'm sorry, I still can't watch you leave.”

Chanhee stares at Inseong’s profile. Tightens his grasp to the point of breaking.

“It’s not about forgiveness,” Sanghyuk snaps. Not suddenly, but like a bow string, pulled arched and taut until it wears under the pressure. His eyes shining, cheeks blotched, bottom lip trembling in his mouth; three key signs he makes no effort to hide. “I don’t care about any of that!”

“We all remember everything,” Youngbin says. Swallows.

“You can ask anyone. I wanted to go, the most out of anyone here. But…” Youngkyun rolls his lips into his mouth, fingers digging into the soft, damp earth. Eyes fixed on Inseong and Chanhee’s joined hands, as if, somewhere in the infinitesimal space between their fingers, there is still something to find. “Hyung, I’m not going anywhere without you.”

Inseong flinches. “But—” he cuts himself off, lamely, scanning the small circle.

Sanghyuk stands up, jabbing a desperate, accusing finger at Inseong. “I remembered for a reason,” he insists, voice thick. “It was so I’d know you.”

“I’m not the one you know, though. I’m a fake,” Inseong says, his voice small.

Taeyang presses his lips together. “Does that matter? You’re Inseong.”

Seokwoo nods slowly, expression twisted up with his sympathy. “You’re ours.”

It was in the distrust. Without their memories, those feelings of grief, anger, and regret, swirled, festered and congealed, simmering in the broken halves of their consciousness—the other halves dying with the truth, the finishing clasp to their emotions.

Seokwoo’s resentment. Taeyang’s defense mechanisms. Jaeyoon’s fondness. Sanghyuk’s overwhelming emotions. Juho, who knew they were trapped before anyone else wanted to confront the possibility. Youngkyun and Youngbin, who were each closer to the truth than they could’ve guessed.

Even Chanhee’s own, all-consuming desire to stay together. Jaeyoon called him hypnotic, but what if it was just—affinity? Something shared between them, for which Chanhee was just a convenient core; a ribcage, for Inseong’s beating heart.

Youngbin, too, pushes to his feet. Crossing the circle in small steps, he stops in front of Inseong to extend his arm. “We all broke our promises the first time,” he says. “But, I’m not letting go this time. Of any of you.”

They—have to be together this time. It’s the only thing that matters.

Inseong’s Adam’s apple quivers in his throat. He swallows, swallows again, lips trembling, and when his eyes eventually water, he makes no move to hide his tears, so they flow freely down his cheeks, cutting through the grime and soot.

Youngbin’s face screws up. “Don’t cry, silly,” he says, trying—and failing—to sound annoyed. “I just stopped.”

Despite this, he drops to his knees, rocking forward to gather Inseong into his arms. Chanhee recognises Inseong’s shock, the lines of his body rigid with tension, and slowly runs his free hand down Inseong’s forearm.

“Sorry,” Inseong whispers, choking on a hiccup. “I’m so—”

Jaeyoon staggers over next, silently folding into the embrace. Taeyang rolls his eyes and drapes himself over Jaeyoon’s back, his arm open for Sanghyuk to slot into. Youngkyun wriggles into Chanhee’s personal space, looping their arms together, his hand open for Juho to take. Finally, Seokwoo wraps his arms around them all as far as he can reach, dipping his head as Inseong breaks down, gasping and shuddering and weeping

They stay like that for a while. What does it matter? All their time is borrowed.

Eventually, everyone starts to pull back. Youngbin stands up, extending his hand once more.

Inseong glances at Chanhee first, before accepting Youngbin’s hand and allowing himself to be hauled to his feet. Chanhee scrambles with him, dizzy, almost colliding with Inseong’s side.

“Then, what about him?” Inseong asks, in the same, small voice. As if they forgot, and a reminder would make them change their minds on a whim. “The—real one.”

Juho stares up at him as if it’s obvious. “He’s you.”

Seokwoo and Youngkyun help Juho to his feet, arms slung around his back. Taeyang and Jaeyoon scoop up the other Inseong. Someone has brought a lined cart to lower them into, scarcely leaving space for another person.

“You should go,” Inseong says quietly, as Youngbin disappears to dole out equipment. “Your head is injured.”

Chanhee opens his mouth to protest—Seokwoo’s neck, Jaeyoon’s back, Inseong’s thigh, and his hand wrapped securely in Chanhee’s—but before he can, Jaeyoon approaches them again.

He smiles at Chanhee first, wide and full, before facing Inseong with a muted, somehow more tender expression. “Give me your hand,” Jaeyoon instructs.

Inseong obliges slowly, freezing when Jaeyoon drops his scrap of ribbon in the centre of Inseong’s palm, closing his fingers one by one.

Inseong smiles sadly. “That’s not how it works,” he tells Jaeyoon, who tips his head to the side.

“You don’t get to limbo yourself,” he replies, the warmth in his expression never wavering.

“But—” Chanhee finds himself saying, his voice narrow and unused in his throat. “Your back…”

Jaeyoon spins like a penny, peeling the bloodied wings of fabric from his skin. “What?” he asks curiously, glancing at Chanhee. The curve of his shoulder just about hides his signature smile. “Does it look bad?”

Seokwoo has done to stitch up Jaeyoon’s back, sealing the ribbon back into his skin with the thread from his very own shirt, but it’s a temporary fix. Blood scuffs the expanse of his golden skin, threatens to bead in frames around his wound. Like Juho and Seokwoo, Jaeyoon’s ribbon has unravelled a little, promising another injury that won’t heal.

“No,” Chanhee says, and Jaeyoon’s grin widens.

“Are you sure? Take a really good look.”

Chanhee rolls his eyes. “Go,” he tells Jaeyoon, nodding to where the others are gathering supplies and preparing to leave. “They’re waiting.”

Jaeyoon sobers, dropping his shirt. “Okay,” he says to Chanhee, then turns the full weight of his attention back to Inseong. “Inseong…”

Inseong nods silently, so Jaeyoon shrugs, hurrying back to the rest of the group.

In Jaeyoon’s wake, Inseong exhales a breathy, uncertain laugh. “I really… don’t understand,” he says, as much to Chanhee as himself. Chanhee squeezes his hand again.

“Come on,” he says.

There are only six horses. Juho wriggles up in the cart to make room for Chanhee despite his misgivings, and Chanhee climbs in, his hand slipping from Inseong’s. He holds his breath, expecting Inseong to find some other reason to disappear, but, instead he just approaches Youngbin, clearly the most experienced rider, with the sturdiest horse.

“Let’s get out of here,” Youngkyun says cheerfully, patting his horse’s flank, before hauling himself onto its back, feet slotting into the stirrups. “We have a train to catch.”

Inseong, his arms slung around Youngbin’s waist, frowns. “I told you, I’m not sure what’s…”

“We’ll find out,” Taeyang interrupts, a small smile unfurling across his lips.

“I’ve had enough of paradise,” Juho adds from next to Chanhee, and Sanghyuk laughs loud enough to disrupt his horse.

Youngbin ushers his horse into a trot, and everyone follows, the cart rocking up and down with the motion. Chanhee knocks into Juho on one side and hard wood on the other, as the dark sky melts into colour above him. Peeking through striped clouds, the foliage of the forest, starbursts of leaves aeons above.

Youngbin slows just short of the edge of the estate, where he and Chanhee met. The cart lurches, Chanhee slamming against the side before it settles.

“Are we ready?” Youngbin asks.

“I wonder what’s waiting for us,” Seokwoo says, head tipped squarely to the unknown in front of them. A painted world, a mirage. The vision Chanhee and Youngbin glimpsed before it was stolen from them.

“I don’t know, but I’m kind of excited,” Jaeyoon says.

“We’ll find out. If there’s a town, or… a city, or even nothing. We’ll find out…” Chanhee falters, distracted, as Inseong dismounts his horse—Youngbin yelping in front of him—and approaches the cart. “What are you doing?”

Inseong takes a deep breath. “Leaving limbo. Filling the hole.”

With that, he slips his arms around the waist of the other Inseong and hoists him up and out of the cart.

Youngbin frowns. “Inseong—”

“No one look,” Inseong says, bashful, before he fishes Jaeyoon’s shorn, bloody ribbon from his pocket and drops it onto his tongue, hastily covering his mouth as he swallows.

Youngbin’s frown turns into a grimace. “Why—”

But, next to Chanhee, Juho sits bolt upright. “Who has a penknife?”

Taeyang reaches into his pocket and tosses it to Chanhee, who catches it and hands it to Juho. Juho flicks open the casing and hurriedly saws off a section of his own severed ribbons, while Chanhee winces sympathetically. “Take it,” Juho says to Inseong, as he thrusts the knife back into Chanhee’s grasp.

Inseong nods, placing Juho’s ribbon between his lips as Chanhee revisits his own. Youngkyun already cut into his ribbon, that piece lost to the nexus, and Chanhee relives that pain, scrunching his eyes shut to slice off the end of his ribbon, before passing on the knife. Taeyang next, then Youngkyun, Sanghyuk, Seokwoo, Youngbin.

“The more the better,” Juho explains, to Youngbin’s shocked look. “Carrying the burden of the one thing he couldn’t accept.”

Inseong chokes, face screwed up as he swallows the last vestiges of silk. Chanhee rubs Inseong’s back as he staggers past, before he turns to crawl into the newly opened space on Juho’s other side.

“Are we ready now?” Youngbin asks, and Jaeyoon laughs, a warm, sweet sound.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think we’re ready.”

Once more, Youngbin urges his horse into motion, prompting the others to do the same, and the cart tips and judders. The forest fades out, opening into towering aged brick walls; the enticing white-iron gate and the afterlife beyond, holding out its hand.

The sun rises above them as they leave the estate: finally, finally, a different dawn.