When Wonho woke up, his groggy mind and the faint, but very prominent, ringing in his ears captured his focus. He dreaded opening his eyes, in fear that the light behind his eyelids would worsen his blinding headache. However, he couldn’t remember where he was or what had happened.

When he finally did open his eyes, he was met with bright, white light from every corner of the room. After his eyes started to focus, he was able to make out that he was in a pristinely sterile hospital room. In the floors he could see the reflections of the lamps and medical equipment amidst the bland space. The walls were painted an off shade of beige and decorated with the generic paintings of vast oceanscapes and wide mountain ranges that he had often is hotels and other hospitals.

His neck was stiff, but he forced himself to look around the room. What he saw surprised him, so much that he forgot all about the pain inside his skull.

A handsome boy was lying in a heap in an armchair across the room. His limbs sprawled out like a starfish and his mouth was open, softly snoring. Most shocking, to Wonho, was that his perfect blue overcoat was drenched in dried blood. He looked utterly ridiculous, yet serene.

‘Did he sleep here all night?’ Wonho thought to himself. ‘What the hell happened?’

The sight of blood made him queasy and after the shock settled, he instantly swung his legs over the side of his hospital bed so that his back faced the boy. He immediately regretted it.

He had roughly yanked out the IV from his arm and now his forearm was drenched with dark red blood.

“!” Wonho cursed, quickly bracing his arm in pain.

~

From his armchair, Hyungwon opened his eyes groggily. It took him a few minutes before he actually came to his senses after his sleep. Sleeping all night in the armchair of Wonho’s hospital room had made his back ache and his legs stiff. However, when he saw Wonho facing him with a panicked face and bleeding from his arm, he began to wake up.

“Huh?...Wonho? Wha-” He shook the sleep from his eyes. “What are you doing? What happened to your arm?”

Wonho’s eyes were on the brink of tears. He was seconds away from bursting, letting all his emotions run from his eyes. Hyungwon had never seen Wonho cry, even after being best friends with him for the better part of 5 years. Wonho wasn’t unemotional, infact he was quite the opposite. Hyungwon felt like he was telling him how he felt at every moment of everyday. But he never cried in public. He hated showing his vulnerability. Hyungwon wished he could reach out and comfort him in that moment, but he seemed so far away; as if his mind was in an entirely different world, but his body was stuck on Earth. He saw that he wanted to desperately to break, and open the floodgates, to let the tsunami out of his eyes. Instead he keep it inside him and let out a small whimper.

“Who the hell is Wonho?”