Wide awake, there he was.
One moment, he was seeing swaying bodies and swirling smoke and inked arms. He could taste the rum and the bitterness of the cigarettes and the freedom. The next, he was seeing red traffic lights and broken bones and trickling blood.
Wide awake, there he felt.
The abyss which held onto him with outstretched arms, the freedom that once would thrust him into the open air, daring him to waste himself like the white cigarettes he'd hold between his teeth. Yet the freedom now felt like a burden, a burden that would trickle between the spaces of his nerves, spaces between the thoughts, whispering to him and trailing its opinions to Yoongi's wide eyes, telling him that he could whatever he pleased to in this empty room.
He could bang the telephone repeatedly onto his head until he'd pass out and bleed to death. He could smash the window open with the wheelchair and jump to his death.
But underneath the ugly gazes of the nurses, the frightened stares of corresponding patients around him, that they were being placed in a room with a criminal, he'd been wheeled into a private room of his own.
Yoongi sat on the hospital bed, refusing to turn on the lights and witness his reflection onto the surface of a glass table or the vitals monitor. But with the moonlight trailing in from open blinds, he saw the swollen eyes and bruised lip on the window's surface.
He wanted to stop caring, to stop the humanity in him that pointed fingers at him and told him what a horrible creature he was. But no matter how many bottles of sweet poison he'd drank over the years, no matter how many useless fights he'd pick on the streets just because he was angry, so damn angry, he couldn't stop the image of the bloodied blue scarf of another on that night.
No longer his posture remained ethereal or scandalous.
He wanted to ask someone how he was doing, whoever it was, to at least know how he was holding up, but he knew that the staff would only scoff and roll their eyes at a criminal, a reckless criminal who deserved to not live.
So when the door clicked open and he prepared himself for another pair of eyes to sneer at him, he glanced over to see two dismayed nurses wheeling in another patient's bed.
He could see one of the nurse's nudge the other and whisper something when they saw the blonde male looking over, but they placed the bed beside his and pressed down on the bed's brakes, double checking to see that it wouldn't roll away somehow. The male nurse turned on the dim lamp that was placed between their beds on the grey nightstand.
And with another look at the clock reading 11 PM, they left with a silent click of the door.
Yoongi's eyes trailed over the sleeping male, wondering how he had ended up in that battered state. There were a few cuts above his eyebrows and a gauze wrapped around his brown hair. Bruises of red and blue and purple were blossoming along his high cheekbones and the older felt rather sorry to see him in a far worse state.
Yoongi felt a sudden pang, an entirely foreign pang.
Care?
He looked away and tried to blink away the feeling that blossomed in an organ that was never touched often.
'This accident has totally fucked you up' Yoongi thought.
___
Hoseok awoke in the middle of the night in a foreign room.
But when he flexed his fingers and finally felt feeling in them, he remembered Taehyung's words of yesterday.
And he immediately wished he didn't feel at all.
He wished he couldn't feel the bile in his throat, the anxiety hammering in his chest, the God damned pain in his head.
Hoseok wanted to cry. He really did. But hearing the news of what the accident had done to his tumour, realizing the remaining time he had left, the announcement revealed no distance for the void spaces between his eyelashes to be coated with wetness.
He still couldn't walk. He hoped that if the medical estimate would be correct, he would be able to regain full strength in his limbs by tomorrow.
Even in the stillness of the faint room, lit only by a florescent lamp, his mind was desperately trying to think of the positiveness of perhaps his fate would be able to conjure.
He felt the presence of another in the room and looked over to his left and witness the blonde figure lying on his side, facing the covered window.
Hoseok knew who he was.
He knew that this male, Min Yoongi, was the reason he would feel the decreased efficiency in his motor skills, the more terrible headaches that would only get better after he'd vomit his insides out, the more weakness and revolting seizures.
That Min Yoongi, an observed individual who didn't give two fucks about the people around him, was the reason he wouldn't be able to fulfil his lifelong dream of becoming an astronomer, was the reason he couldn't leave the hospital even if he wanted to, was the same fucking reason that Jung Hoseok,
a victim of stripped time and an incurable tumour,
a victim of unfulfilled wish lists and an untouched degree,
a victim of unwitnessed tomorrows and discomforted pain,
a victim of early death and late life.
And as Hoseok turned off his lamp and stared at the glow in the dark stars upon his ceiling, he wished that he could live just another week longer, another day longer, another damn hour longer than what the doctors had told him and do the things he wanted to do but never did, Jung Hoseok reached out his arm and wished that even if he wasn't close enough to touch the burning celestial stars that danced in our galaxies, he hoped he could touch the sticker stars upon his ceiling.
But Hoseok couldn't even touch them.
So when the tears finally trickled down his aching cheeks, he clamped his hand over his mouth and hoped, that the male who was lying opposite on the other bed didn't hear his cries and sobs, as he whispered the words to himself over and over again,
"sixty days."
___
