Still With You | JK ff

Chapter 19 - Fate or Fateful?

He was walking towards you from the far end of a hallway, a proud stately stride, his arms stiff by his side. Your senses blurred to all the sights and sounds around you save for him, as he moved closer towards you. The sound of his footsteps echoed in your ears and grew louder with every step, until you could hear the rustling of his clothes, the passage of his breath, the beating of his heart. Loud and clear, as he passed by you without glancing in your direction, his nose turned upward.

You felt a pang in your chest, like a stake driven through your heart. You clutched your chest, bent over in half, panting for a breath, as the sound of his footsteps faded into the distance, and other sounds began to take its place. Voices, snickering, cursing, your name in loud breathy whispers. You straightened up to find a crowd gathered around you, accusatory eyes shaming you, with their hands pressed to their mouths and their fingers pointed at you.

A tug on your hair yanked your head backwards.

"You should braid your hair more often," he spoke into your ear from behind you, yet his words seemed to cast a strange echo all around you. "It makes for an easy leash."

You spun around and found him smiling down upon you, kindly. You parted your lips to speak, yet no sound would come out of your throat. He began to laugh, an innocent carefree guffaw that grew louder and louder, magnified multifold with the echoes filling all the silences in between.

A pang cut through your heart again, a slice in your chest right through to your back. You clutched at it again and your hand came back painted crimson. You looked down to find his hand holding a knife dug between your breasts.

"You are doing this to yourself Y/N," he frowned at you, no longer laughing as before.

You looked down again to find your own blood-stained hands pushing the knife deeper into your ribcage, the scraping of metal against your bones reverberating through your chest.

You looked back up at him, pained and afraid. You weren't in the hallway anymore, you were in that room again, with the dusty yellow walls, the cloudy windowpanes, the dim lights, an unexplainable haze in the air. Sungho appeared from behind him, laughing cold and sinister. He turned towards Sungho as he seemed to murmur something into his ears, too silent for you to hear. When he looked back at you, he pressed his palm over your lips.

"You promised you wouldn't ever hate me," he said as his hand began to smother you.

"Minho!" you woke up shrieking his name from the base of your throat, your voice cracked and hoarse. Your entire body was shivering, drenched in cold sweat, with your calf cramped from squeezing your toes too far. You propped yourself on your elbow with difficulty and struggled to remove the weight of the blanket from over yourself. Then you just lay there, curled in the fetus position, massaging your leg as much as your weak hand could manage, while the trembling slowly subsided everywhere except your gut, which still felt shaky, like turning in on itself with disgust from uttering that name.

This was your fourth or fifth dream – nightmare – in the past week, since your encounter with Jo Jiah. It was frustrating how sensitive and vulnerable your psyche was, crumbling like a house of cards with the slightest gust of wind. Perhaps burying all feelings and thoughts about the matter wasn't the healthiest way of dealing with it, even though it had felt like the only way to survive back then. Now your subconscious was manifesting your fears every night, forcing you to address the trauma once again.

Eventually, you crawled out of bed, there was work to be done – work that you were now being paid to do. You dragged your feet on the floor, roaming around your apartment aimlessly. Then you focused all your attention on all the mundane things – brushing your teeth just a little too hard, scrubbing your skin aggressively, trying on a few too many outfits even when you knew you had to spend the day in an apron covered with dust anyway. Anything to keep your mind from straying down that lane, down that abyss. Yet it did slide right down to it every time your focus slipped.