plugged in | minsung

part 20

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Bright lights became streaks in the sky as the car sped through suburban streets. The dark night air closes in. It's silent, too silent. The car continues to move quicker. Red lights mean nothing to the driver. Nothing means anything, not right now.

Nothing but him.

Minho's hands grip tighter on the wheel until the bones in his knuckles threatened to spring out from under tightly pulled skin. He can taste blood in his mouth, feel blood drying into a crust above his eyebrow.

The passenger seat is empty. The backseat, too.

A scream bubbled up his throat and erupted through chapped and bloody lips. Minho slammed one fist into the steering wheel and screamed again. Who cares? No one can hear him here.

The silence is too much so he tries to fill it himself. Anything to drive the image of Jisung being carried into a hospital out of his mind.

What could be worse? Minho could be. Only half an hour ago, he had stopped the car outside the hospital, his skin slick with sweat and his mouth drawn tightly shut.

"Get out."

"Hyung-"

"Get out. Take him in there. Make them fix him."

Hyunjin hadn't dared to argue. He'd just scraped up Jisung's body from the backseat, lifeless and stained with dark puddles of blood, and led Felix into the hospital.

Minho had left them in the rear view mirror.

The car whipped almost uncontrollably through dark, quiet suburban streets, the occupants of these house tucked safely up in their beds. Minho had never felt quite so jealous.

It was around half an hour before Minho finally shifted the car into neutral, turned off the engine, and climbed out of the drivers seat. He stumbled on his feet. He'd been hurt more than he thought during the fight, and the bones in one of his legs didn't feel quite right.

You deserve it. Embrace it. The voice in his head sounded familiar.

Minho approached the high wrought-iron gates of a graveyard. The gates were held tightly together with a padlock. Minho ignored the pain in his leg as he gripped his hands around the metal bars and hoisted himself up and over, landing with a thump on the other side.

Even after so many years, he knew the path well.

His knees sank into the soil as he bent down in front of the gravestone. It was clearly looked after; where others were covered with fingers of creeping moss, this one was clean. There was a bunch of flowers propped up against it that seemed barely a few days old. Someone had lit a candle there, and watched it burn down until the wick gasped for more air.

"Mum," Minho mumbled through tears.

The stone against his fingers was rough and cold as ice. He touched it gently as though it were made of glass. One of his fingers caught on a sharp nook in the gravestone and left behind a pinprick bloodstain. Minho whimpered.

Before he could stop himself, he had his phone in one hand. He fell backwards on his feet so he was sat in front of his mother's grave. He tried not to think about her body below him as he dialled a number with unsteady fingers. The number wasn't in his contacts list.

The line rang for a while and Minho was about to hang up before someone answered with a sigh.

"What is it?" asked a cold voice.

"Why can I not stop breaking things?" Minho sobbed down the phone. "What am I doing wrong?"

He was crying unashamedly. No one was there to see him. His vision blurred and he struggled to breathe through the snot in his nose. The noises he was making, thick with spit yet weak from his ragged throat, filled the silence on the other end of the line.

"Have you taken something?"

Minho could have screamed. So he did, a guttural noise that tore through his chest and his throat and his mouth and spiralled into the night air.

"What does it matter?" He was yelling down the phone. "Fuck, what did it ever matter? Do you realise that you were impossible to please? Do you realise that I never stood a chance? What else did you expect to happen?"

"Are you trying to blame me?" Minho was surprised that his father had replied at all. He had expected nothing more than silence.

Minho gulped for air. He wasn't sure what to say. He was already regretting dialling the number at all.

"Can I be blamed when it was you who took something that night? Can I be blamed when it was you who called for your mother to come and collect you? Can I be blamed when it was you, you who made her leave the house at all?"

Another sob bubbled up from Minho's lungs.

"You can't blame me, Minho. You understand that, I'm sure. She was coming to get you. So how could it be anyone's fault but yours?"

"I was fifteen!" Minho screamed. "I was fifteen, and I'd spent fifteen years being your slave. Who could be surprised that I ended up fucked in the head? It wasn't me who hit her car, abeoji. It wasn't me who spun her off the road."

Silence crackled down the phone line again.

"But in your eyes, it was," Minho whispered. "I'll always be the cause of the problems. I'm not sure why I bother to convince myself otherwise."

When Minho's father replied, his tone was cold and harsh. "You break things, Lee Minho, because you simply do not care. You never have. I told your mother this a thousand times, but she couldn't see through you like I can. You're poison. You have been since the day you were born. I'm surprised you would ask me why you break things, because I've answered that question more times than I can count. You are broken, and so your toys are, too."

Minho sniffled. Both were surprised when the call suddenly went dead, Minho pressing at the end call button until his finger threatened to go through the screen.

After his mother's death, Minho's father had doubled down on this idea, the idea that Minho was unfixable. But his final sentence just then had flicked a switch.

Jisung was not a toy. And he wasn't broken, either. Not yet.

And Minho was not unfixable. Jisung was  starting to convince him that he didn't need to be fixed.

Minho brushed a kiss against the headstone, wishing a silent goodbye to his mother, before he was sprinting even on his bad leg back to the car.

The engine was used to going far too fast, but tonight he pushed it even faster. He pushed himself just as fast as he pulled up outside the hospital. People ducked into corridors to avoid him as he hurtled through the hospital in search of the Accident & Emergency ward.

He found it. And then he found Jisung.

Jisung was in his own private room. He wasn't moving, his body seeming far too small in the hospital bed. A clean white sheet was tucked up around his armpits and his chest was covered in the thin fabric of a hospital gown. He was hooked up to a handful of machines by clear tubes. Some pumped strange coloured liquids back and forth. A rhythmic beep kept in pace with his heartbeat, slow and steady, a beat that whispered Minho's name.

Felix was asleep on a sofa at the end of the bed. Minho didn't even look at him.

He just sighed and crawled up into the bed beside Jisung, paying extra attention to the wires that tied him to the hospital bed. Back where he belonged next to this boy who had changed so much in such a short time, he could forget the aching pains in his body. Minho buried his head into Jisung's neck and mumbled into his skin.

"I'm sorry I'm late, angel. But I'm here now."

Somewhere deep inside the foggy dream that Jisung seemed to be content in, he smiled.

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