Watch Over Me |Woosan|

Part 2

It seemed the stairs would never end.

San tried to get him to stay at the top in the cabin, but Wooyoung argued that leaving him alone again was a sure way to get him killed. San didn't have an argument against that.

There wasn't a railing, and the crutch didn't work well with stairs, so Wooyoung leaned heavily on San's shoulder, arms wrapped around each other like a couple of drunkards.

Their footsteps echoed, and the deeper they went, the colder it became. The reverberation made it easy to imagine someone else trailing behind them, dogging at their every step. Every so often, they paused and listened. And listened.

Nothing.

So they continued on. San opened his phone and switched on a flashlight. All they could see were narrow cement walls closing in on them. Wooyoung's teeth chattered, and San's hand shook as he lit their path.

"There's the end," San said, and yes, the stairs tapered off at the bottom, the room up ahead still out of view. San swiveled the flashlight back behind them, illuminating the empty stairwell. "I'm going in first, and I don't care what you say. You're safer behind me"

Wooyoung didn't want to argue with him, not when they were possibly mere footsteps away from danger. But he clutched at the back of San's shirt and hopped behind him as he walked ahead.

There was good new and bad news.

The good news was that there was no one in the room, at least, no one immediately visible. The bad news was everything else.

They were practically standing in a cement block. Dim light blinked on up above from a fixture. A mattress lay in the corner, sheets wrinkled on top of it. There were more Polaroids of them, except these were taped to the walls of the room. San walked ahead to get a closer look at them.

Wooyoung stared at the trap by the foot of the bed. Blood still stained over the metal like rust. He and San hadn't stepped foot in the kitchen since that had happened—they had enough snacks up in the bedroom to last a day without a full meal—but it was obvious someone else had been in there to clean up their mess.

Arms wrapped around his middle, and Wooyoung jumped until he realized it was only San, pressed up against his back.

"Don't look at the pictures, Youngie."

When someone told him not to do something, it only made him more inclined to do so. San should have known that by now.

"Scarier than the ones upstairs?"

"Yes." San held on for dear life. "I just want this to end."

"Me, too."

Me, too.

He walked over to the nearest wall, eyes trailing across the photos. They were like the ones they found earlier, except now, it was a collage of San smiling at a stranger with red X's for eyes and black lines across his neck.

As disturbing as it was, Wooyoung only froze after he walked further into the room. The pictures morphed from the two or them having fun to just San.

Just San.

And they were taken weeks before their retreat. In the midst of autumn. San was tied to a chair and his eyes were shiny and scared. His face was bruised, and blood trickled from the side of his mouth. It started rushing back, then, and Wooyoung didn't realize how much he was crying until San turned him around and cupped his face in his hands, cooing and shushing.

In the midst of autumn, his Sannie had gone missing.

It had always been the two of them, side by side.