Prompt #4

Warning: Mentions of druge use

The scratch in his throat, the dry feeling, the horrible cough and the pounding headache.

“Min?”

He wasn’t there. It was a gamble if he was ever there.

Luhan stumbled from his bedroom, stepping over Jongdae’s girlfriend, a needle stuck in her arm. Breathing, twitching, and terribly alive, she was there but not there. Like a lot of people around them.

“Min?” He dragged his hand through his hair, looking left then right as he stared into the kitchen. Dishes and empty liquor bottles, takeout food containers, things that didn’t matter. “Min?”

The kitten, that little orange creature Jongin had dropped off, chirped and meowed and Luhan didn’t have time for that.

“Min?” The front door wasn’t locked, it swung open with the lightest touch.

The small garden, just outside the 12 square feet of paving stones. He wasn’t there. Parsley and weeds and the grandmother next door casting curious glances at a shirtless misfit standing outside calling for his boyfriend.

“Min?” He wasn’t out back or passed out near Baek’s rusted out Volkswagen. He wasn’t anywhere.

Eventually Luhan gave up searching, hunkering down to watch television with the girl who finally figured out how to pull the tiny metal stick from her vein.

“You think they know?” She asked, pushing the bowl of popcorn – the stale bowl of popcorn from a night forgotten – towards Luhan.

“Know what?” He would eat the whole bowl if given the chance.

“That none of us care.” She eschewed food for cigarettes, puffing away she tried to sound like she had learned something from the chaos she created, that she existed in. “That like, none of it really matters in the end.”

“Did you see Minseok? Did he leave?” Luhan didn’t care about pretentious intellectual bull. He cared about Minseok.

Wherever he had wandered off to. This time.