Alone Together [RIIZE]

16. Things Get Worse

Sungchan has a nightmare.

Smoke is filling his lungs and he can see things burning around him. Stuffed animals being burnt to a crisp at his side and picture frames melting with the heat of the flames. Everything in his life is being destroyed around him in a red blaze and a dark haze, and all he can do is cough and crawl against the floor like a helpless child.

He isn't sure if his mother had made it out of the fire already, but it's not his job to look out for her. Right now, it's up to him to survive and crawl away, ducking underneath the wreckage and poisonous gases in a desperate attempt to escape the house himself.

He reached for the door. The doorknob is hot, but he knows it's the only was to get out of this room. His hands sear against the metal, opening it and expecting to see the ruins of his burning house, like usual. He expects the next part -to scream for his mother as he beelines it for the front door, barely escaping a falling beam.

He's had this dream before, he thinks.

Instead, he's met with a young man with no discernible face, aiming a gun at him. The man is untouched by the fire, apart from dark singes on the edges of his fancy white suit.

A matching white rifle is pointed at his nose, aiming right between his eyes. He scoots back against the burning wall, horrified as the man cocks the gun and loads two bullets, re-aiming it.

He doesn't know what's going on. There's nowhere to run and Sungchan only has a split second to plead for his life before a pristine bullet is surging through one side of his skull and out of the other in a splatter of crimson, which only fuels the flames.

...He jolts awake in his bed, breathing heavily and looking around. He'd get recurrent dreams of the night his parents' restaurant burnt down, but he's never had that dream before.

He never died in his dream before and certainly never saw an ominous man with a white rifle either.

Sungchan is scared, but he wasn't sure of what. The gunman? Or the dream itself? He felt a pit in his stomach, like something awful would happen soon. Jungwoo called it anxiety, but Sungchan called it intuition. Maybe it was a bit of both.

It felt eerily similar to the feeling he got the morning that Mark was found dead and the night his parents' restaurant burned down. And -call it what you'd like- every single time he got the feeling, something life-altering happened to him.

Someone was going to get hurt and that made him want to vomit. It's like an omen that only Sungchan can see -or feel, in this case.

He stopped his breathing to listen hard, past the sounds of traffic outside of his walls and shouting in the street this late. He listened, shutting his eyes tight... and only opened his eyes and breathed again when he heard both Johnny and Jungwoo's hushed voices downstairs.

"They're okay." He breathed out, relieved that both of them were safe and sound, though still coping with the loss of Mark. The house was a bit quieter nowadays, Sungchan thought.

Wanting fresh air, he slid out of bed and trudged to the window. He leaned on his wall as he lifted the glass pane and looked outside, surprised to see a disheveled, sleep-deprived Wonbin leaning against the railing of his balcony, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"Oh." He looked up in surprise and nodded his chin towards Sungchan. He lifted his hand to reveal a lit cigarette sitting in the familiar grooves between his fingers. "Y'know, I've been so stressed lately that I've been smoking like, whole packs of these a day." Wonbin turned up his nose is disgust, but took another drag anyways. "I smell like a rotten ashtray."

"You always smell like a rotten ashtray." Sungchan mutters, though it's not unkind. Wonbin hears the fondness in his voice and decides to let that one slide.