Blood Ink ✔️

54: Scream

It's like a brick wall of inferno slamming into you, and you physically feel your body being lifted off the ground with the force of it.

You fly backwards through the air, free falling for a split second as a blistering heat bathes your skin. When you slam back down to earth, the carpet on the ground does no good in lessening the impact. You're on your side and twisted, facing the wall.

Stars dance like silver dots in your vision, ears ringing with a piercing sound that muffles your thinking. It's unprocessable, the sharp slats of orange and red and brick and stone that fly by your vision, dance like a hurricane of color and fire through your sight. 

The air is hot and thick. You can barely think, barely see.

You can't hear anything but that piercing ring.

As you watch in a daze, a piece of glass falls from a shattered picture frame. It tumbles down through the scarlet air in slow motion, touching the floor with a sudden harsh crack.

With that same harsh crack, you come back into yourself.

Coughing in the light smoke that shrouds the air, you lay there, stunned, trying to wrap your head around what's just happened. Your skin feels warm but not burnt, and a couple shards of glass are embedded into your forearm. Blood is beginning to well up around the incisions, but they're small.

Other than that, as you catalogue movement of your limbs, fingers and toes, everything feels fine. You can't hear much still, but your mind is beginning to wake up from the stun it received during the explosion.

Then, it hits you, almost as violently as the blast moment ago.

Hoseok.

Hoseok blocked you and Jungkook.

With a cry of horror your lift yourself on trembling arms, pushing up from the carpet.

If he got hurt like that, using his body and foreknowledge as a shield from that viscous blast that could've torn his body apart, you'll-

You'll-

What will you do?

If that bright sunshine smile and those dark doe eyes and that magnetic, enthusiastic soul go down in a ball of flames here, the entire earth will stop spinning on its axis to grieve Jung Hoseok.

The entire universe.

The stars and the moon and the sun in the sky will shed tears over his loss.

But a quiet groan dampens your worries, and the shifting of a slender body rolling over, bruised and singed but conscious.

Hoseok sits up, grimacing as glass pieces and a few small chunks of cinderblock clatter to the ground off of his form. His eyes are awake, aware, searching. They meet yours with relief.

A tiny billow of smoke curls around the singed edges of his ebony hair.

Through your muffled hearing, someone else moves behind you.

You twist your torso to see Jungkook there, pushing himself to his feet unsteadily, holding his injured shoulder. By the slight dent in the plaster wall that divides the hallway and the living room, you can only assume that he was thrown against it.

You hope his wound hasn't reopened again.

Turning to face the rubble that was once the back of the house, the part that formed the bedrooms, you almost cry at the early evening sky looking back at you.

A whole third of the house is gone, and you're all lucky Hoseok got you as far away as he did, right out of reach of the edges of whatever exploded.